


always already

by sullypants



Series: night moves [3]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Recreational Drug Use, Sex, Underage Drinking, and a soupçon of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24263524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: Jughead goes north to Albany, Betty goes south to New York.College in four weekends, over the course of four years.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Series: night moves [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713856
Comments: 131
Kudos: 172
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. one

_What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle._

  
  
  


Her parents arrive on Friday afternoon.

They’ve traveled down together from Riverdale via car, but have chosen to stay in separate hotels. Betty doesn’t question them about this decision. 

Her mother’s hotel is so close to Columbia it’s nearly on-campus. Her father is much further south, nearly in midtown. 

(He later tells her that he’d booked his room via a discount website, something her mother surely would never have allowed had they still been together.)

.

They take her out to dinner at a place in the West 80s she herself would not be able to afford. It has all the hallmarks of a restaurant her mother has selected only after extensive Yowl research: a lengthy wine list, attentive service, hearty steaks.

Her parents are civil toward each other, but direct most of their questions and focus toward her. Her mother drinks two glasses of malbec; her father a single scotch and soda. Betty drinks sparkling water. 

By the time she returns to her dorm around 9:30, she already feels exhausted. 

.

Saturday passes in a blur. 

She escorts her parents to the open breakfast for the families of first-year students. She tours them through the library, and through several of the academic buildings in which she has classes.

After a rushed lunch on the South Lawn, where there is a pre-homecoming barbecue in progress, she brings them to Furnald Hall and shows them her bedroom.

It is small, with a narrow single bed and a full wall taken up by a wardrobe. 

She’d spent about forty-five minutes the previous day tidying, scrubbing all the surfaces, and remaking her bed with freshly-washed sheets.

Her mother does not comment on the cleanliness of the place, but she does nod and turn to Betty, telling her, “You have a lovely view of the lawn.”

Her father nods in agreement.

Betty counts it as a success.

.

They do not stay for the Homecoming game. 

They depart—her mother across Broadway to her hotel, and her father in a cab downtown—and Betty exhales a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. 

.

During her first week of college, Betty spends a lot of time in the floor lounge down the hall from her bedroom. She spends time in the lobby of the building, where there was seemingly always several tables set up, activities to consider or join. She listens to her fellow first-years, tried to speak when she feels comfortable speaking. 

The week is a blur of mixers and bonding activities and first-year tours, and then classes began. 

Five courses, six hours each, spread out over the course of five days. It is her first semester, and her major is undeclared. Everything is introductory level—but even though the assigned readings seem doable, and the class discussions are on par with some of her previous AP course experiences, there is an air of her hand being held throughout the week. There is an attitude of being told she is special in one ear and told she is dime-a-dozen in the other. The dissonance feels true. 

.

She’d gotten to know the surrounding area slowly, and on foot. 

She initially fell into a routine of running laps around the Reservoir in Central Park—but by the third day she was bored, and veered south through the park after her second loop. 

She emerged on 59th Street, and found her way north through the Upper East Side, looping out through Yorkville, and then back into the park, eventually emerging at 110th, finding her way back to Morningside Heights. 

(She knows none of this until later, when she reviews her running app, and notes the names of the neighborhoods she has passed through.) 

She begins to set out for her runs before six am, with no pre-planned destination in mind. If she finds herself somewhere she couldn’t decipher from the surrounding street signs, she’d consult the map on her phone.

But more often than not, she finds her way back.

.

Betty meets Priya on move-in day, after her parents have left. She is only half-unpacked, but she leaves her boxes and walks down the hall to join the rest of her floormates—mostly first-years—but also a few sophomores, who are treated by their younger compatriots like the font of all knowledge—at a mixer in the floor lounge, arranged by their RA.

Betty’s initial impressions of Priya had perhaps not been generous.

Priya had asked Betty about her dating life and shared that she “only dates desi guys who are at least six feet.” She’d then allowed “five-ten, if they’re very physically healthy.” 

But then Priya asks her about her major. Betty is undeclared, but tells Priya she is interested in journalism, in psychology, in English literature. 

Priya talks about her AP US Literature class, back in Indiana. She tells Betty about her interest in biochemistry, despite also being undeclared, about maybe going to med school. 

Priya—assigned one of the floor’s few double rooms—introduces Betty to her roommate Brigitte, and from there, Betty begins to learn more names.

.

Still, it’s different, getting to know people. She grew up in Riverdale, has never lived in any other place. She knows everyone in town, and everyone knows her. She’s never had friends or acquaintances that were _new_. 

She considers how this might be a very different effort, and how it might get more complicated over time. She tells herself to not think too far ahead of herself.

.

Two weeks into classes, Betty has her first remote, virtual session with Dr. Glass.

The security of having a private place to meet with her therapist was one of the reasons she’d ranked her preference for a single room so high. 

(Her mother had also spent several hours on hold with the insurance company, arguing and confirming that telehealth was a covered benefit. Predictably, her mother is tenacious and ultimately victorious.)

During their first session, Betty finds her eye continually drawn to her own image, inset to the bottom right of her laptop screen. She has to continually pull her eyes upwards to look at Dr. Glass.

Two weeks later, before their next session, Betty takes a post-it and sticks it to the side of her screen, where it will obscure her view of the inset. 

.

In the third week of September, Cheryl takes the Metro-North down from Poughkeepsie to spend the weekend. 

Betty’s not sure how Cheryl will feel about sleeping on her floor, but the day before her cousin is due to arrive she receives notice of a package delivered for her. 

She ends up lugging a massive—yet oddly light—cardboard box down 116th Street and over Amsterdam. The mail clerk had taken pity on her, and she’d fashioned a sort-of handle out of clear packing tape. 

Once she’s made it back to Furnald, she takes a breather in the first floor lobby, avoiding the doorman’s curious looks. It’s then she gets a text from Cheryl.

_Did you get my delivery?_

Breathing heavily, Betty types her response.

_what is this thing?_

_Compact air mattress_ , Cheryl responds. A moment later she sends a series of emojis: a red heart, lipstick, an apple, and a red mailbox. Betty rolls her eyes as she pockets her phone, and moves to drag the box toward the elevators.

.

A weekend with Cheryl feels like a throwback, even though it has been less than a month since she’s last seen her cousin.

Cheryl tells her about Vassar, about the several flirtations she’s already begun to foster, about reading Flaubert in the original French. 

Betty isn’t sure how the topic arises (she suspects the alcoholic Shirley Temples Cheryl has made have lubricated the conversation; “Shirley Temple _Black_ , cousin.”), but Betty finds herself confessing that she feels a bit lonely.

“It’s hardly been a fortnight,” Cheryl tells her, fishing a maraschino cherry out of her glass. “Give yourself a minute.” 

.

Betty texts with Jughead daily. She calls him every few days. 

She asks about his classes, about Albany, about the campus. He tells her about his roommate (“He’s six-foot- _seven_ , Betty.”); about getting lost in the library stacks for twenty minutes before finding his way out; about the food in the dining hall; and about the student he’d found in his underwear, passed out on the lawn, during rush week. 

.

Jughead arrives after nine pm on Saturday evening, by which time Betty knows her parents are at least thirty minutes outside of the city.

She meets him in front of her building. She’s not sure what direction he’ll be arriving from, so she pivots in a slow arc, watching the dark forms of people passing.

She spots someone tall and slender, with the tell-tale misshapen lump on their back that signifies a backpack. When he passes underneath one of the path lights, he is momentarily illuminated, and even though he is still a few minutes from reaching her, she can’t suppress a smile.

.

He makes an _mmm_ sound as he surveys her little room. “Living that single life, huh? Very bougie.” 

She rolls her eyes at him. “Most of Furnald is singles, but there are a couple doubles. Apparently the likelihood of keeping a single room decreases each year, but who knows, maybe I won’t always do on-campus housing.” 

“It’s nice,” he tells her. She turns off the overhead light and moves to stand next to him at the window, where the darkness of the room makes it easier to see the lawn, the city beyond it, at night.

.

When she slowly wakes, the red light of her clock tells her it’s still not yet seven am. 

After Jughead had arrived, she’d showed him where the men’s room was on the floor, telling him to meet her back at her room.

She’d washed her face, and brushed her teeth.

When she’d returned to her room, it was to find him laid out on her bed in his boxers and a t-shirt, his hands behind his head, eyes closed. 

She’d pushed slightly at his torso and he’d shifted, allowing her to pull the blanket out from underneath him.

She’d laid herself next to him, pulling the sheets back up over them both.

In the narrowness of the bed, he’d stretched his arm out underneath her pillow, and she’d slotted her calf between his. 

She does not remember falling asleep.

Now she carefully turns over, taking care not to disturb Jughead’s arm under her neck. But when she faces him, he’s already awake, playing solitaire with one hand on his phone. 

She returns his smile, and burrows herself deeper under his shoulder. 

Watching his game, she reaches a finger out of the blankets and moves the ace of diamonds one spot to the right.

“What’d you do that for?”

“I don’t like when it’s red-red, black-black, or black-red-red-black,” she tells him, and he nods. “Alternating colors is more soothing.”

.

When she wakes again, Jughead’s phone has been abandoned to her bedside table, and he is asleep, his mouth slightly agape. 

She slowly pulls herself away and walks down the hall to the bathroom, where she pees and brushes her teeth.

When she returns, he is just where she left him. She tucks herself back into his side, and he stirs, pulling her closer and burying his face in her neck. She combs her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck, and closes her eyes.

.

She comes to with the warmth of his hand over the skin of her stomach. She is struck by the span of his hand, and it occurs she has missed his hands. _Is it odd to miss someone’s hands_ , she wonders. 

When she opens her eyes he is watching her. 

He leans in to mouth at her neck, and as though spurred by the gentle sound she makes in response, his mouth begins to move lower, nosing down the strap of her camisole.

When his nose meets her bellybutton, she reaches down to pull her top off, and nods to encourage him, his fingers hooked into the waistband of her leggings. He kneels between her legs to peel them off. 

He moves to nuzzle again at her abdomen, and she runs her fingers over his scalp.

He begins to move even lower, and Betty tries to breathe slowly. 

They have not done this before. They have spent the summer having sex, but they have not gotten to this point yet. It is a kind of vulnerability she has not yet been able to stomach. She has gone down on him, but has not yet let him go down on her.

But now she nods, and he continues to move his mouth slowly, slowly, down her abdomen. She leans her head back onto the pillow and closes her eyes.

At the first sensation of suction on her clit she gasps, her arm swinging wide until it slaps the wall beside her bed.

They both laugh, and it feels almost as good as the orgasm that follows. 

.

They walk about fifteen minutes south to Jacob’s Pickles for brunch. 

(She’d texted Veronica a week earlier for an appropriate recommendation, caveating she wanted it to be something Jughead would definitely like.

Three dots had appeared, and for a moment Betty waited patiently for Veronica’s response, before having a mildly panicked thought.

She’d quickly typed and sent out a follow-up message to Veronica: _don’t say anything_. The three-dots had disappeared briefly, only to be replaced by the arrival of an emoji with a zippered mouth, then a happy purple devil, and finally Veronica’s signature purple heart.)

Jughead wonders if they should take the subway, but the weather is mild; autumn hasn’t yet arrived. She’s a fast walker, and his strides are naturally long. 

She shakes her head, and tells him they might as well walk.

When they arrive, Jughead is hesitant. 

Betty does not typically eat out; her budget doesn’t quite allow for it, and she’s conscious about trying to squirrel away the small-yet-generous allowance of pocket money her parents insist she accept, in addition to the small pot of wages she’d made doing actual work for them at the _Register_ during the summer, in the aim of making it last as long as possible. 

She knows without having to ask that Jughead probably never eats out, instead taking advantage of an unlimited meal plan, and—Betty knows from their on-going text conversation, and having witnessed during their weekly FaceTime calls—the occasional home-made meal. 

“I’d like to take you out for breakfast, Jug,” she tells him. He stalls mildly, and she follows her statement with, “You didn’t let me get you a birthday present.” She raises her brows at him, like this is her trump card.

“You’ve been making me baked goods since your mother allowed you to use the stove unsupervised,” he argues, but it’s with a smile.

She narrows her eyes. “I’ll go in alone.” The threat is gentle, but she hopes effective. Jughead considers her. “Also, it’s much more reasonable than you’re expecting. It’s not Pop’s, but it’s not crazy.”

.

“They have _three_ kinds of root beer, wow.” 

Betty orders a vegetable and cheese omelette; Jughead the classic breakfast platter. They ask for a plate of pancakes to share. 

“Do you want to order any of the pickles?” she asks him, and he considers the menu. “Or the meat? Seems a waste not to,” she adds.

Jughead turns to their server. “No thanks, we’re good.”

Betty squints her eyes at him as the server refills their coffee cups, and he stifles his smile, if a little unsuccessfully.

.

After eating, they wander east into the park.

The sky is clear, and the weather still carries an air of late summer heat.

“That was delicious,” he groans. “I need a nap.”

She smiles and takes his hand. “Walking aids digestion.”

Jughead expresses some interest in finding a sunny spot of grass to stretch out on, and Betty bites her lip.

He pulls at her hand. “You have plans for us, don’t you?” 

“I thought we’d go to the Met?” She swallows, but doesn’t look at him. “Or maybe the Frick?” He swings their hands between them, and she meets his eye. “We can get the student discount.” 

His hand releases her, and loops around her shoulder. His torso feels warm next to hers as they walk. 

.

“Okay.” She opens a map and studies the floor plan.

“We obviously can’t see everything, but we can check out one or two exhibits.” She looks up and considers him. “I think you’d like the Greek and Roman stuff, the Egyptians. And then some twentieth century American stuff?”

Jughead closes his own map, slots it back into the rack of maps, orderly arrayed by language. 

“Lead the way,” he tells her.

.

It is the first Monday holiday of the school year, and the museum is fairly crowded. Betty’s gallery selections prove to be some of the most popular exhibits. As they wander into the nineteenth century, she momentarily considers teasing Jughead for having plebeian taste, but bites her lip as he cranes his neck to get a better vantage of _Madame X_. 

“You can sort of see the painted-over bit on her arm,” he leans his head down to her and whispers. The visitors in front of them move onto the next painting, and she and Jughead step forward for a closer look. 

She leans head slightly to the side, to mitigate the glare of the gallery lights as she looks. 

“It’s darker,” she nods. “Her skin is so white.”

.

She loses track of him among ancient Greek amphorae, locating him again where he stands in consideration a stone sarcophagus. 

The sculpture depicts a man and a woman, laid out atop their tomb. She assumes they are ( _were_ , she thinks) married, or together in whatever way people were together in—she slides into the spot next to Jughead and bends to read the information plaque—the fourth century B.C.E.

She straightens and roams her eyes over it. It’s large, slightly larger than life. When she cocks her head to look slightly closer at an eroded section, where the wife’s hand is missing, her head accidentally bumps Jughead’s shoulder. 

.

As they walk toward the entrance of the museum, he reminds her of _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler_ , tells her this is where the restaurant fountain was, the one Claudia and Jamie plundered pennies from. 

She practically gasps in joy, and when he leans in close to whisper to her, “Do you want to hide out and stay the night?” She smiles, and leans up to kiss him.

.

Mid-September, when she’s walking back to Furnald from her introductory freshman English composition class, her phone begins to buzz in her back pocket.

She’s surprised to see it’s Jughead. Typically he’ll text before calling her. She’s trying to convince him to make more use of FaceTime, so she can see him, but progress is slow.

She answers cheerfully, and when she hears his voice, her smile falters. She’s quiet, waiting for him.

He’s silent for a moment, before: “My dad got another DWI.”

Betty hears herself gasp, and she’s instantly annoyed at herself. It’s the same gasp her mother (and Polly) make: a high-pitched sharp thing that they’ll emit at even the most minor of inconveniences—dropping a plate that doesn’t even shatter, hearing surprising news about who-married-who. 

“Yeah,” he says, and they’re both silent. Betty doesn’t want him to retreat, and so she tries to gently pry.

“Do you know what happened? I thought he was—”

“Yeah, he was.” 

Jughead’s father’s first DWI occurred when they were both freshmen at Riverdale High. It was before his parents had divorced, and Jughead’s confided to Betty that he considers it perhaps the final inciting incident that led to that split.

But it was a first offense, and so FP had been sentenced to community service, and successful completion of state-run outpatient rehab, and continued commitment to sobriety. He’d begun attending AA meetings, from what Betty understood.

He’d put in the work. Before the divorce was even official, FP was sober. Jughead’s mother, for reasons Betty has never felt comfortable enough to pry into, did not contest FP’s claim to custody. She’d picked up and moved to Ohio, where she was from, leaving Jellybean and Jughead to their newly sober-father. 

“He’s in touch with his sponsor, and he’s back attending meetings.”

Betty nods, even though Jughead can not see her.

“Have you talked to Jellybean?”

“I talk to Jellybean like four times a week,” he tells her. “She hasn’t said a thing. I feel like this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. I mean—I guess it can. But I dunno.”

Betty considers his words, but before she can summon any thoughts, he continues.

“I don’t think she’s dumb, Betty.” He’s silent for a beat. “I think she might have been hiding it from me.”

Betty’s heart aches a little. “Oh, Juggie.”

Jughead adores his sister, is very protective of his sister, and always has been. Betty knows the lengths he’d gone to, when only a preteen himself, to hide both their father’s drinking and their parents’ tumultuous relationship from her. Betty cannot imagine how Jughead feels to find out that Jellybean has supplanted his role and begun to return the favor. 

“I’m gonna go visit her tomorrow. I have a friend who’s from Albany, he’s going to let me use his car. It’s only a few hours’ drive.”

Betty makes a soft noise of assent, but she also feels what she thinks might be an oddly-timed moment of jealousy.

She’s ashamed to recognize it, that she is bothered Jughead has friends that she does not know, who spend time with him she is unaware of, that he is so far away. 

She reminds herself that it is okay to feel and think, that she can only control how she acts. _Do not play the jealous girlfriend,_ she says to herself, and corrects: _do not play the jealous_ whatever. 

.

At a check-in mixer the week following Cheryl’s visit, she spends a half hour talking with a guy from Illinois named Raj. He seems a little less pretentious than a lot of the other attendees, and he says something about his film studies elective that makes her think of Jughead. 

She knows movies. She can talk about movies.

Later, walking back to her dorm with Priya and Brigette, Brigitte turns to Betty and asks if she will add Raj on social, if she’ll continue to flirt with him. 

Betty’s surprised by the question. Raj had been friendly, but she hadn’t noticed flirtation in their interaction.

“Oh, he was definitely into you,” Brigitte argues. 

Priya nods in agreement. “He likes you.”

“Oh,” Betty responds, idiotically. “I’m...not single.”

“Wait, really? You haven’t mentioned that, have you? Am I just forgetting?” Brigitte looks to Priya, who shakes her head.

Betty isn’t sure she has an answer.

_Is this_ Jughead _she has mentioned her boyfriend?_ they inquire. 

It feels like a two-paths-diverged-in-the-wood moment. 

Jughead is not Betty’s boyfriend. This is not a conversation they’ve had. They’re together, but she hasn’t used _those_ terms (in his presence, at least), and knowing Jughead as she does, she wonders if her first thought—that he’d be spooked—is the correct one. 

She loves Jughead; she knows this. He seems to love her, too. 

(She feels a pang of doubt, but reminds herself—his actions tell her he loves her, his words tell her, too.)

It does not feel right to tell her floormates that Jughead is anything but...Jughead. But she knows they will not understand this. They will hear not-my-boyfriend and will read it as unserious, adolescent. 

It doesn’t feel adolescent to Betty. What she’d felt for Archie was adolescent. What she feels for Jughead is...something that has seemingly always been there once she finally noticed it. 

“Yes,” she tells them, as her thumb nail digs into the fleshy part of her palm. He is her boyfriend, she agrees.

It feels easier than trying to explain an eighteen-year relationship and all its various iterations, but she wonders if she’s starting off on the wrong foot with these new people in her life, by telling them an untruth.

Riverdale had been different. There was no one she didn’t know or hadn’t always known. 

Now she finds herself one person on a campus of thirty thousand. A small girl on an island of two million, a city of eight million. 

_Does this make it harder to be a person, herself_ , she wonders. 

.

During a study session in the library, following a short discussion on Priya’s anatomy class—such that the topic shouldn’t be so totally out of left field as Betty feels it to be—Priya asks, “Have you slept with him?” 

Betty keeps her eyes on her notebook for a moment, but internally she freezes. Priya’s tone is conversational. Betty wonders if it’s facetiously innocent. 

She finishes the note she’s taking before looking up.

“Why?”

Priya shrugs. “Just curious.”

Betty runs the pen between her thumb and index finger.

This isn’t really something she’s ever discussed with anyone beyond Jughead. Kevin had inquired, and Veronica asked leading questions, but they hadn’t really gotten anywhere.

She considers. What difference can a mere handful of months make in how she feels about this question? Is it the asker, the lack of shared history between her and Priya? Is it fear of judgement? Is she a prude if she denies an answer, is she a whore if she is honest? 

It’s not a dichotomy that she’d ever confronted in Riverdale. Her adolescence was spent trading Veronica for quaint dates with Archie, until she’d turned sixteen and things changed.

She’d spent the nearly the entirety of junior year spring break in her bedroom, if not exclusively in bed. She hadn’t even run. Her mother had first scolded her, then commanded her, and finally attempted to reason with her. 

She began meeting with Dr. Glass the very next week. 

She ran again. She spent time with Veronica, with Cheryl, with Kevin, with Jughead. She did not date Archie again. The appeal wasn’t there. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened. 

And then when senior year had rolled around, she’d begun looking at Jughead a little differently. 

The summer after graduation had felt like a bubble, and now it’s finally going to pop.

She cuts bait. 

“Yes,” she tells Priya. Her inflection makes it sound like a question and she instantly feels ashamed for uptalking.

Priya nods, and turns back to her own homework. 

.

After Jughead buys two hot dogs from a street cart, she eats a protein bar she’d tucked into her purse, and they wander back through the park. 

They lose track time, spread out in the sunshine on a patch of grass. Betty thinks Jughead has dozed off at one point. She feels bad about using their time unproductively, but tries to let the feeling pass. It niggles at the back of her brain.

.

After a dining hall feast (even Jughead concludes her options are decent, for college cafeteria food), they take the elevator back up to Betty’s floor where, hand-in-hand in the corridor, they run into Priya.

“ _Ohhh_ , you must be the boyfriend,” she directs to Jughead. “I’m Priya.”

Jughead exchanges greetings, and Betty tries to hold herself together. She does not remember saying hello or goodbye to Priya, leading or being led by Jughead to her room, nor does she remember unlocking the door, Jughead taking a seat on the edge of her bed.

She does remember coming into herself when she finally speaks.

“I...didn’t know what else to call you,” she explains lamely. “To her.” Jughead nods, but she cannot read his expression. 

She busies herself at her desk, and Jughead fiddles through his phone. 

He excuses himself to the bathroom, and while he is gone, Betty pulls on her pajamas. It’s still early, and she supposes she should shower. But she feels suddenly exhausted, and incapable of collecting her shampoo, her conditioner, her body wash, a wash cloth, and lugging it all to the bathroom.

It’s enough effort to brush her teeth and splash water on her face.

She returns to her room before Jughead does. She places her copy of the _Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1_ , in the door to leave it ajar for him, tucking herself into her bed. She stares at the ceiling.

Jughead returns, and he places the textbook on her desk before he climbs over her to claim the spot closest to the wall. She does not meet his eyes, and as he burrows into her duvet, she reaches toward her bedside table to turn off the lamp. 

.

In the morning, she leads him again to the dining hall and tells him to load up a plate. 

Their conversation feels trivial. She asks him when his bus departs, even though she has known the details of his itinerary for weeks, had memorized them and repeated them like a mantra.

They bring the plates back to her room, where she sits at her desk to eat, and he sits on the edge of her bed.

She tries to think. She tries to summon the courage to have the conversation she knows they need to have.

It feels like digging her fingers into her palms. She has not penetrated the skin of her hands since she was sixteen, but right now, it feels near. 

“Do you want the chance to...see other people?” she asks. He is silent, and her heart sinks so low she has an inane flash image of it simply falling to the ground, down and out her pelvis, _sploshing_ in a splash of red onto the laminate floor of her room. She cringes a little at herself for thinking so graphically about it. 

His foot taps the laminate in time, and his eyes stay downwards, staring at a spot on the floor. His hands are interlaced on his lap, and Betty watches one thumb rub back-and-forth over the other. 

When he looks up and meets her eyes she feels shocked at the vast nature of the sadness in his eyes. He runs his tongue over his teeth.

“Do you want to see other people?” he asks her softly.

Betty feels her eyes widen. She wants to do this right. She wants to be honest, but she feels her heart beating quickly and knows her anxiety has the power to sink her if she lets it. It has before.

But she doesn’t want to be that Betty. She _isn’t_ that Betty, she tells herself.

She inhales deeply through her nose, exhales slowly through her mouth.

“No. I _don’t_ want to see other people, Jug,” she says. “I only want to see you.”

Jughead’s hands fly up in incredulity and Betty’s heart skips a beat. 

“Me either!” he nearly yells. “Why would you ask that?” 

The dissonance confuses her. “What do you mean?” she argues.

“Why would you ask if I wanted to see other people, if _you_ didn’t want to see other people?”

Betty feels anger rising up her throat. She doesn’t want to cry, she tells herself _don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry_. She remembers all the tricks she read about to keep tears at bay, pinching the spot between your thumb and index finger, looking upwards. The only one she’s ever had success with is looking up, and so she turns her eyes to the drop-ceiling tiles. 

They are both silent. Hands on her hips, she breathes in again, breathes out again. She doesn’t remember having gotten up from her desk, but somehow here she stands. She tries to focus on the facts of the moment, tries to visualize her feelings floating out of her body.

She’s surprised when Jughead speaks, but is even more surprised by his words.

His voice is much softer, far from the loud tone he’d used previously, when he tells her, “I feel like we’re talking past each other.”

It strikes Betty immediately as a very insightful thing to say, especially coming from Jughead. Her surprise pushes her anxiety to the side, and she’s instead struck by a feeling of guilt at thinking Jughead isn’t capable of sophisticated thought. _No_ , she tells herself, it’s not underestimating him, it’s just a feeling of surprise. _It’s a feeling, it isn’t something I can control_ , she thinks to herself, _it’s not what I choose_. 

She nods at him, moves to sit next to him on her bed. 

“I think...that’s true,” she tells him.

“It feels pretty unproductive.”

She raises her brow, nodding again. “I agree.” She narrows her eyes at him, and decides to be blunt. Bluntness has worked before with Jughead. “Jug, will you be my boyfriend?”

He shrugs and lifts his hands a little.

“Yeah.” He looks at her, a question written in his brow. “Is it really that simple? I’ve never been a boyfriend before.”

Betty feels a giggle bubble up in her chest. She’s feeling some emotional whiplash. 

“I think so,” she says. “I think it’s just...we discuss what we want it to be and...come to some terms of agreement.”

He makes an _mmm_ noise and nods a little, thinking. 

“That sounds very adult.” 

Betty giggles again. She marvels at how strange this whole day has felt. 

“Okay,” she begins. “ _I_ would like to only date you, and I would like you to only date me. What are your thoughts?”

He shrugs and nods. “I agree.” 

“Okay, should we define dating?”

“ _Define_ dating?”

“I’m really trying to cover all our bases here, since we’re clearly both capable of walking in circles on this,” she states, and Jughead nods in agreement. 

“Okay. Okay, dating is…” he trails off in thought, looks to her in guidance.

She thinks. 

“Dating is kissing, sex—all varieties” she counts each item with her fingers and he nods in agreement at each point, “general...romanticism?”

“What if I want to get my Wordsworth on?”

“Please,” she rolls her eyes and continues. “Honesty? Emotional support?”

Jughead looks thoughtful.

“This sort of sounds like everything we’ve already been doing,” he tells her.

“Yeah, I agree. I think maybe we just needed to admit it to ourselves.”

She ponders for a moment, but then recalls she’d just mentioned honesty, and it wouldn’t do to fail at this so soon after it’d become official.

“Jughead, I think I’ve wanted us to be _together_ -together for a while now. I probably should have said something earlier.”

He shrugs a little—Betty feels a small flash of affectionate annoyance—and then says, “I probably did, too.” He rubs the palm of one hand up and down his thigh, tensing his arm. “I just...you know this. I’m not good at _doing the thing_ first.” His palm gestures outwards at his inflection. 

Betty reaches her hand out and rests it against his neck, runs her thumb over the curve of his jaw where it meets his ear.

“I know,” she says, cocking her head and giving his neck a subtle push so he’ll turn to look at her again. “But we did it.” She smiles. “That’s something.”

.

Betty takes the subway down to Port Authority with him, to see him off on his bus ride. He tells her she doesn’t have to waste her time going back and forth on the train, and she merely rolls her eyes at him in response. He doesn’t argue.

She kisses him deeply, not even sparing a second thought to who might witness them. When he says he’ll see her at Thanksgiving, she pulls him closer, nuzzles her nose into his neck and breathes, trying to soak in as much of his scent as she can, that thing that makes him smell like Jughead. She thinks it might simply be the smell of his laundry detergent, but it feels more complex than that. 

She wants to remember his scent. She wants to remember it when she’s up late writing an essay that is due at nine am, when she’s spent her sixth straight hour in the library, when she finds herself navigating the space, via text, between her parents.

She wants the unknown space to be filled with Jughead. _She_ wants to be filled with Jughead.

He boards the bus due for Albany, and she watches it pull out of the bus station berth, as it departs in a burst of dark exhaust. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from Rachel Kushner's _The Flamethrowers_.
> 
> Admittedly there are no Etruscan sarcophagi at the Met (their loss), but this is my fiction and I do what I want.
> 
> Edited to add—I entirely forgot to mention that there's a scene in this chapter very inspired by a similar one in Sally Rooney's _Normal People_. If you know, you know.


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a difference between making decisions and letting things happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a content warning, drinking + sex are combined in this chapter.

_the passing there / Had worn them really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black_

  
  
  
  


Jughead can spend several thousand dollars a semester to share a ten-by-ten space with one other human, on-campus, as he did during freshman year. 

Or he can spend a couple hundred per month to have his own room, access to a shared bathroom, and a kitchen that is unlikely to be utilized for much more than pregaming a night out—a series of outings that he will inevitably decline to attend—off-campus. 

He will share a slightly ramshackle house with eight other college-age guys and he thinks _it is what it is_.

The decision seems so obvious that he feels it has already been made for him.

.

They’ve just returned from the diner a fifteen minute walk from his house (“It’s no Pop’s,” but Betty likes the grilled cheese, and Jughead thinks the burger is decent enough), when they encounter Samm in the living room.

(The living room is really no more than the most central-feeling room in the house, furnished with an absurdly large television, a PS4, an ancient Nintendo 64, and a sectional sofa that might be older than him.) 

Samm asks if they’re going to come out with the rest of them, out to _the bars_ , as he refers to the single strip of nightlife that Albany—or the part of Albany near the university—offers. 

Jughead feels neutral on the idea. He’s just as happy to spend the evening in his room, with Betty his only company. He turns to face her. 

“Do you have a fake ID?” he asks.

She nods. “Do you?”

“Yeah; I’ve never used it though,” and she laughs. 

.

They do not last long out on the town.

Theo—who had so vocally rallied them for the evening in the kitchen—encourages them all to take shots, and these shots are followed by drinks, and yet another round of shots, and then a round of Long Island iced teas.

In the back of his mind, Jughead calculates his portion of the tab. He thinks about how much money he holds in his Venmo account.

His hand finds a home on Betty’s thigh, where she covers it with her own. She rubs her thumb over this knuckles, and continues her conversation with Kim, who Jughead knows from his nonfiction writing seminar.

He feels tipsy, very close to the border of drunk. When Betty leans into him, presses her lips to his ear and tells him she wants to go home, he does not argue.

.

  
  


There’s a part of his more sober, more sensible self—a consciousness that gets muted by alcohol—that repeats the mantra _don’t have sex drunk, don’t have sex drunk_.

But this voice is drowned out by the sound of Betty’s moan as she mouths at his neck, as she grinds her hips down into his and throws her head back, as her hands move over her own breasts. 

After they’d stumbled home from the bar before the rest of his housemates, she’d pushed him into his bedroom, pulled her dress over her head, and stepped out of her underwear before his brain could catch up with him. 

He has enough wherewithal to notice her bra before she distracts him with the push-pull she manages, kissing him while simultaneously moving him backwards to his bed. 

It’s not something he recognizes, deep blood-red satin that lifts her breasts high, and his drunk-brain realizes that she has worn this for him. 

That as she tugs him free of his jeans, as she runs her hands up and down his thighs, and as she slides down onto him, whispering _Fuck that’s good, that’s good, that’s good_ , that she has worn this for him.

Betty is so rarely vocal in this way, that his drunk-self—and even somehow the deeper, more rational and sober part of his brain—tells him to shut the hell up and let her do what she wants. 

They end up fucking at the foot of his bed. He’s still half-clothed. One of her breasts has freed itself completely from the bra. 

It isn’t until he comes that he realizes he’d neglected to reach for a condom from the box in the top drawer of his bureau.

.

She stretches herself out on her stomach next to him, and he listens to the sound of their breath as it slows. He moves a hand to poke her side.

“Hey,” he pants, “go pee.”

Betty huffs a laugh. “That’s not real,” she says, her voice muffled in his sheets. 

Jughead doesn’t have a gynecologist (nor a vagina), and he assumes if anyone would know what is best for herself, it’d be Betty. 

“Can’t hurt, right?”

She turns her head and smiles at him, eyes still closed. “No, no harm. But it sort of depends on the person.” 

She reaches behind her back and unhooks her bra, gently tosses it to land atop her dress, puddled on the floor. She turns onto her side to face him, propping her head on her elbow and brushing her hair back from her face, and Jughead’s eyes linger on her breasts. 

“I just don’t want to have to put clothes on to go out there.”

He brings his forearm up and rests it behind his head. “No one’s here.”

“Well, with my luck,” she tells him teasingly, shrugging. 

(He’s again distracted, and turns his gaze briefly to the ceiling to focus.)

Jughead can still feel the alcohol in his head, in how his eyes move slowly back to her face.

.

She does eventually pull a clean t-shirt from the top drawer of his bureau, tugging it over her head as she walks down the hallway to the bathroom. 

.

He thinks being drunk makes it take longer for them both to get off, but his brain is so soupy that he’s not really able to parse the thought until the next morning, when he wakes up tangled in his sheets, mostly-naked and sweaty, squinting his eyes against the light that streams through his curtains. 

He digs a bottle of ibuprofen out of his bedside table, doling out two tablets for her and three for him, encouraging her to drink from the liter-sized bottle of water that rests atop his bureau. 

They doze for another four hours.

.

He’s never forgotten a condom before. 

He’s reminded of the time in late December he’d spent the better part of a day in Betty’s childhood bedroom, marathoning _Bojack Horseman_. 

Every time they’d clomped down the stairs and into the kitchen for snacks, Mrs. Cooper had eyed them in a way Jughead couldn’t fail to notice. 

Jughead isn’t unfamiliar with Mrs. Cooper’s discerning eye. On this occasion she doesn’t say anything to him beyond what might be considered normal.

Betty’d held an electric heating pad over her stomach for most of the day, and at the time he’d assumed she had her period.

They continue watching _Bojack_ over the next several months, both together and apart. They attempt to catch up with one another, so that occasionally they can watch together via video chat. 

It isn’t until months later—in the city over Presidents’ Day weekend and sitting on the edge of Betty’s narrow dorm bed, his legs stretched out in front of him, watching as she scrolls through her calendar in search of that very date, having now finished the whole series and curious to know when they’d started it—that he learns any different.

“Oh, it was when I got my IUD,” she tells him now. Jughead can see the calendar event over her shoulder. Betty’s calendar is color-coordinated, and there it is in teal: December 29, _GYN appt_.

He nods slowly in understanding. For a few moments they’re silent. Betty moves to answer a text—or he thinks she does. Months later his memory has completely papered over this in lieu of the larger conversation.

“I’ve read that’s pretty unpleasant,” he says. 

Betty shrugs. “Well, it wasn’t _fun_ , I’d say, but I think I must have a good gynecologist. She gave me the good drugs,” she wiggles her eyebrows. “And by that I mean those giant ibuprofen pills, you know, the ones you can only get by prescription.” He chuckles, and she smiles.

“There was also a…” she waves her hand a little, “ _thing_ , the day before.”

“A thing?”

She bobs her head side to side. “Not really sure what to call it, and I never remember the name, but it was a tablet. Miso-something.”

When he doesn’t respond, she raises her index and middle fingers and crooks them in an upward motion. 

“Not a...suppository? But like it.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. “I see.” 

She makes a _mmm_ sound. “Something to do with softening the cervix,” she tells him. There’s a hint of a smile on her face, and he feels himself trying to suppress his own. He watches as she momentarily places her tongue literally in her cheek before continuing. “Most I’ve ever talked about my cervix outside of a doctor’s office.” 

“Hey,” Jughead says, cocking his head and fully grinning. “I guess...who else spends as much time with it? 

The sound of Betty’s laugh is so golden, he thinks he might be able to survive on it alone for weeks if necessary. 

They fall back into a comfortable silence, and to Jughead’s mind it feels thoughtful. 

“Does that mean…” he trails off. It feels like a weird thing to ask. But Betty’s always been very direct with him on this topic. 

She looks at him and raises her eyebrows again. She nods. “It does.” She shrugs a little. “Or it can.”

“Hm,” Jughead responds. After a beat, he tells her, “I’ve never done that before.”

Betty looks at him, shakes her head with another thoughtful _mmm_. “Neither have I.”

.

When Jughead wakes again, it’s with the clarity of having slept through most of a hangover. The urge to fill his stomach with fat and carbohydrates feels almost primal.

Reaching to his bedside table, he grabs his phone, swipes through to find his folder of food delivery apps. 

He orders three burgers, two servings of french fries, and one side of chicken fingers. He requests extra ketchup.

.

When his phone buzzes, he hauls himself out of bed and stumbles downstairs to meet Alexei ( _four-point-four stars_ ) at the front door.

Stopping at the kitchen to grab a handful of paper towels from the roll next to the sink and two IKEA plates from the cabinet, he takes the steps back to the second floor slowly, trying not to jostle what feels like the delicate equilibrium of his brain floating inside his skull.

He crosses paths with none of his housemates, but there’s some far-off noise that suggests the house isn’t empty.

.

Betty’s sitting up against the wall that serves as his headboard. Her shoulders swim in his t-shirt, and she scrolls through her phone with one hand while the other lifts the bottle of water to her mouth. 

When she spots him she smiles, and the smile widens when he shakes the to-go bag at her. She inhales in delight.

They end up eating lunch ( _or is it breakfast?_ ) on his bed, _Bob’s Burgers_ playing quietly on his laptop in the background. 

They talk about the essay Betty is writing for her social psychology class. She asks him about his postcolonial literature class. He tries to impress her with the knowledge that he’s practiced his pronunciation of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and feels satisfied when she laughs at him. 

After one-and-a-half episodes their meal is mostly decimated, and Betty has tucked her hands underneath the pillow and begun to doze again.

Jughead disposes of their trash in the bathroom. He quickly brushes his teeth, and then returns to his bedroom, where he slides into bed next to her. 

He cannot spoon her, as she lays facing him, but he is able to lay his arm across her waist. His breath begins to slow in time with her own, and eventually he falls asleep again. 

.

If Jughead knows anything about his own conception—and he truly wishes to know as little of the specific details as possible—he understands that he was an accident.

He knows that his mother was barely out of high school, that his father was freshly out of the Army, and that they only got married once it was clear he would soon make his presence known. 

.

For the majority of his childhood, Jughead does not perceive his parents as _together_ in the way his friend’s parents are _together_. 

He observes, in between rounds of MarioKart, that Mrs. Andrews and Mr. Andrews have a kind of ease in their interactions that he’s never witnessed in his own mom and dad.

He does not grow up feeling unloved. When he skins his knee, his mother carefully rinses the grit out of his skin, covers the wound with a bandage, and microwaves him a plate of his favorite chicken fingers. 

(The dinosaur-shaped ones taste better, his five-year old self will argue with her repeatedly. They’re different.)

But sometimes she is distant. 

She would become loud. She would yell, and her anger would be in response to something that just the week prior might have simply caused her to roll her eyes in mild annoyance.

For a period of time, maybe a week, sometimes two, she’d spend long stretches of hours in her bedroom. 

Jughead’s father would make them dinner, almost always hot dogs boiled on the stove, or spaghetti, occasionally the special treat of a Pop’s burger. 

Jughead would tiptoe past her door, and if he was feeling brave, he might put his eye to the crack. The room remained dark. 

When Archie asks him about his mother’s occasional disappearances, he is not sure how to parse the question. It’s not until Archie asks that it occurs to him this isn’t a thing Mrs. Andrews does. 

But then his mother would reemerge, and things would go back to normal, or whatever normal was for them. Because Jughead has begun to wonder about _normal_ , and about _weird_ , which are both words he’s encountered in reading the Baxter Brother novels he likes trading with Betty. 

Despite this, Jellybean appears on the scene when he is six years old. He only understands the unlikelihood of this when he’s older. 

.

When he is just newly fourteen, his mother departs. His father is just barely sober. He and Jellybean stay behind in Riverdale, and their mother goes to Ohio. 

.

He does not spend much time thinking about what his mother’s life might have been like had she something like an IUD been available to her. 

He knows he would not exist in such a world. And so when he finds himself walking down that path in his brain, he reminds himself that it is purely existential, that there’s only so much benefit to playing out the _what ifs_. 

.

On a nondescript weekend in October, Jughead’s housemate Theo asks if he’d like to join a few of them in dropping acid.

Jughead considers for a moment. He thinks about the context, and Theo clearly sees the cogs in his head whirling, because he jumps right in with details of the plans: the when (tomorrow), where (the house’s living room), the who (Samm has volunteered as their designated sober friend), the why (why not?) 

When all the details are laid before him, Jughead merely shrugs.

_Why not_ , he thinks. The decision is as good as made for him.

.

Theo holds his palm out toward Jug, and balanced upon it is a small saucer he recognizes from the kitchen. He’s not sure he’s seen anyone ever take it out of the cabinet before. He’s never found a matching cup for it.

On it are several little squares of what look like paper, each containing a minute image of—Jughead squints—Lisa Simpson.

“They don’t do sugar cubes anymore?” he jokes, and Theo only winks in response. 

.

It may have started in the living room, but Jughead finds himself in the house’s half-finished cellar.

He can’t recall making the decision to come down here, yet here he is.

The basement is bisected by the stairs leading to the kitchen. The unfinished side is home to the washer and dryer, to their own nondescript storage items (Theo’s snowboard, Frankie’s skis), and what Jughead thinks are several generations worth of miscellaneous boxes, left behind by all the previous college students to have lived in this house. 

What was once a family home, built in the fifties, has for decades been a way-station for dozens, maybe hundreds, of SUNY students—undergrads, grad students, maybe the occasional med student or exchange scholar. 

The other half of the basement is designated ‘finished’ by virtue of two types of carpet, laid parallel to form a misshapen rectangle, and a brown-and-orange couch that reminds Jughead of nothing so much as the couch that lived in the trailer when he was a small child.

That couch had clearly been purchased sometime prior to 1975, and he assumes this one must have been, too.

Now he finds the strange brown floral patterns of the sofa especially fascinating. They whorl and swirl and the fabric feels like some kind of synthetic. He runs his palm over it, back and forth, and it has the soothing shift of velvet when pressed upon.

He thinks he needs to tell Betty about this couch. She needs to know this, she would surely remember the old couch in the trailer. He would also like to hear her voice.

He reaches for his phone in his pocket, but his hand is intercepted.

Samm is there. Jughead doesn’t remember being followed down the stairs, but now he gently takes Jughead’s phone out of his pocket. “You don’t need that right now,” Samm tells him.

.

In the kitchen, he is still alone. He’s not sure where everyone else has gone. Looking through the window over the sink, he can see the backyard is empty. Not leaving the house any further than the backyard had been one of the agreed-upon rules. 

He opens the cabinets, one by one, and leaves them open.

He considers the several dozen mugs that sit in the cabinet above the coffee maker.

Many have come with the house. He assumes several were brought by his housemates. Two are his.

He owns a diner mug from Pop’s, with the logo nearly worn off by decades of use and abuse by the diner’s industrial-grade dishwasher. 

He felt a little bad when he took the mug, given the number of free refills of coffee Pop had bestowed upon him over the years. Now he thinks maybe he’s just borrowing it. Maybe he’s babysitting it. Mug-sitting. He’ll bring it back when he graduates. Maybe he’ll sneak it back into the diner, only to take another one the same day.

( _But where does he take that one after he’s graduated_ , he wonders.)

The only other mug he calls his own is a gentle slate blue, and it reminds him of Betty, and not simply because it depicts the Columbia University crest. This blue is Betty, he thinks. Betty is this blue.

.

Starfished out on his bed, he thinks about Jellybean. He thinks about Riverdale Elementary School, about nearly setting the gymnasium on fire by accident. 

He tries to make a mental note to remind Jellybean not to play with matches. He should call her tomorrow, he thinks. 

(Tomorrow, as he boils water for pasta, he will remember this thought and laugh at himself. JB is thirteen.

He still needs to call her, he decides. Since their father relapsed the previous year, he’s become more vigilant about talking to her, and not simply via text. 

Jughead had asked for Betty’s advice in how to approach this topic with JB, who had clearly begun hiding things from him. He still worried. 

He’s also made a point to check in with his father at least once a week. He’s completed his community service, and it sounds like he’s still attending meetings. 

He thinks about what it says to JB that he asks her about their dad as frequently as he does. Sometimes he’s torn between the guilt of asking and the guilt of not asking.) 

He feels himself sink into his mattress and he realizes he _is_ the mattress. Jughead—the body Jughead knows to be _his_ body—is not here. There is only a full-size mattress, with a mattress pad Betty had insisted he purchase to make it more comfortable. Something about how he slouches when he types, messing up his posture.

He is now the mattress, and the mattress pad, and the striped fitted sheet and the striped top sheet, and the navy blue duvet, and the three pillows in striped pillowcases that sit atop it. 

He hopes Betty will still visit when he’s a mattress. He wants her to sleep well, and hopes he will be soft enough for her, that she will find comfort in him. 

.

  
  


When he tells Betty all of this—or rather, selective excerpts of it—the following week, once again in New York on Columbus Day, she cocks her head and narrows her eyes, considering him.

“It wasn’t bad,” he tells her, and though she rolls her eyes, she’s smiling.

After he’s regaled Betty with his adventures (or misadventures) in LSD, they watch a movie on her laptop. They make themselves comfortable on her narrow mattress in her single bedroom, in the same residence hall she called home last year. 

It’s only eight o’clock, but Betty begins to yawn no more than twenty minutes after the opening credits.

About thirty-five minutes in, Jughead turns his head to peek at her. She’s out cold.

Jughead wakes at nine-thirty the next morning, and he’s surprised to find Betty still asleep. 

.

When he leaves to get the subway down to Port Authority, she begs off, asking if he minds.

“I need to finish this essay before tomorrow,” she tells him.

He tells her it’s fine—and it is. She doesn’t have to schlep all the way downtown on his behalf. 

She hugs him goodbye next to the elevators, and she watches him board the elevator. Before the doors close completely, she sends him a small wave.

.

When Jughead wakes from his post-burger, post-hangover nap, Betty is gone.

A text message on his phone tells him she’s gone for a run. He lets his head fall back onto his pillow, pinching the bridge of his nose.

After a few minutes he summons the resolve to get up and shower. 

.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Betty drives the Stingray to the trailer park. The car remains stored in the Cooper garage during the school year.

(“It makes zero sense to bring a car to New York, and my dad would probably miss tinkering on it.”)

They drive through the town. There’s been no snow in Riverdale yet that year, but from previous experience, Jughead only assumes that means they’ll get a blizzard come April.

By the time they have parked and are walking a trail that runs parallel to the river, he and Betty have stumbled into a conversation about relationships. 

They discuss their peers. They talk about what they’ve witnessed of casual dating around them.

She tells him she’s met Polly’s new boyfriend via FaceTime; that Charles’s romantic life—or possible total lack-thereof—remains opaque.

He tells her about the guy Frankie seems to be seeing (“Not my boyfriend,” Frankie had said), who’d graduated from Albany the previous year and was now a first-year at the university’s med school. 

He wonders out loud about his dad. 

(He does not mention his mother, but the absence feels like a kind of presence nonetheless.)

She tells him her mother had mentioned a _colleague_ and said no more. Betty had sensed the situation to be new and delicate, and did not press.

Betty tells him about her friend Brigette’s on/off thing with an NYU student named Peter. She tells him Priya has met someone named Shruti and moved in with her seemingly overnight. 

(“Mid-semester?” he’d asked. She nods, widens her eyes briefly in emphasis.)

She tells him about a guy from her research ethics class named Adam.

She tells him about Adam’s independent study—a project in which he’s getting to actually interview people and collect data—and about his professed interest in getting a PhD—even though he’s still only a junior.

Jughead listens quietly.

.

By the time they’ve crossed the pedestrian bridge over the water to Greendale, Jughead asks her, “Do you think we should…” He isn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

Betty stops. The path has narrowed and so they walk single-file. She leads them: she knows the trails here much better than he does. 

She rubs her mittened hands up and down her thighs, and now that they’ve stopped Jughead can see his breath in the air. The sun’s about an hour from setting, he thinks. It’s always a little sad when the days get short in November, he thinks.

She turns around to look at him, crosses her arms over her chest. She keeps his gaze for a moment, but then it drops to the bed of brown pine needles under their feet. 

Betty’s silent for so long he feels compelled to fill the silence.

“You should…see if you like him,” he tells her. “Have a drink with him.”

“With Adam?” she asks, and he nods. Her brow pulls together.

She lifts her gaze to the branches of the tree behind him, but doesn’t say anything. 

.

The period between Thanksgiving and winter break feels almost exactly as it had the year before. He now knows the pattern of the days and weeks.

He goes to class, he tries to keep up with the assigned reading, he turns in paper after paper.

He texts Betty every day. He talks with her on the phone several times a week. Occasionally he’ll even initiate a FaceTime call with her. He knows she likes to see him, and even though the little inset image of him on his own screen makes him self-conscious, his desire to see her outweighs this. 

She finishes every phone call by telling him she loves him, and he returns the sentiment.

He tries not saying it once, and after they’ve hung up he feels awful. He hasn’t felt so terrible in years. 

He immediately texts her _good night_ followed by a moon emoji and a blue heart, and it’s several minutes before she responds with a simple _night xo_ and a sleeping emoji, Zs floating off into nothingness.

He feels panicked for two days, until their next call. 

He tells her he loves her before she can, and when she responds, she blows him a kiss through the screen.

.

Come December, he heads back to Riverdale early, after he’s turned in his final essay of the fall semester and before the exam period has even officially ended. His father is at work, JB is still at school, and Betty shows up at the trailer, wrapping him into a hug.

“I don’t want to be with anyone except you,” he tells her, and he feels her nod against his shoulder.

“I know,” she says.

.

She tells him about having a drink with Adam. She tells him that Adam had kissed her good night and that the next day she’d texted him, saying he’d been nice and thanking him for being a gentleman, but that she couldn’t date him. 

“Did you see anyone?” she asks, and he shakes his head.

“It was stupid,” he tells her, and she nods. 

“I’m glad we’re agreed on that.” After a moment, she continues. “I feel like you keep trying to give me an out, Jug.” She rolls her bottom lip between her teeth. 

He’s reminded of the summer they’d spent together before college, about the time they’d gone to the swimming hole at some ungodly early morning hour. Betty had said something about how different he’d been that year. He doesn’t remember her exact words, just how they made him feel. 

“I need you to trust me, Juggie.” She keeps his gaze and again nods at him. “I know what I want. Okay?”

His lips rub together. He can feel her thumb as it rubs back and forth over the back of his hand. The fabric of the couch feels rough against the back of his neck.

“Okay,” he tells her. 

.

The summer before college—a time he thinks of as _Betty’s summer_ , although he’s never told her that—Jughead opens an incognito window on his browser, types in the URL of Planned Parenthood, and reads everything he can about birth control.

(He’s proud of his computer password’s level of difficulty, takes pride in it, and he chuckles at the irony of an incognito tab—an extra-protective layer of information security—given his current topic of research.)

He realizes things between he and Betty have escalated, and logically, there is a next phase to whatever it is they are doing. 

(She has suggested as much, first with her actions and then outrightly, in so many words.)

He is not about to let history repeat itself. He is not his father, and Betty is not his mother. 

When he gets to the section on LARCs, his mind momentarily contemplates the implications of the words “long-acting.” 

He’s begun to accept that he’s felt differently towards Betty for perhaps a lot longer than he’d originally allowed. He thinks whatever he feels for Betty—and at this point he does not yet think of it as love, cannot fathom thinking of it as love, even if weeks from now he’ll realize that this is exactly what it is—might always have been there. 

What has changed is him, and probably her, too. He’s grown around this thing that was there, and somehow—maybe; possibly; sometimes he even hopes—he’d changed with it. 

Despite this, he struggles to believe that there isn’t a logical end to their _whatever_ , even if he himself cannot yet imagine what it looks like. It might just be the end of summer. 

(He hopes it isn’t.)

.

Jughead waits until his sophomore year to declare a major, and even then it feels like a sort of rote inevitability. 

So far, all of his electives fulfill specific requirements for an English degree. In the back of his head, he thinks he knew this when he chose them. He wonders if his subconscious was making a decision for him. 

He discusses it with Betty on a warm September evening, watching through his laptop as she folds laundry on her bed.

He misses her. He feels a bit stupid for thinking it. The semester, the _year_ has only just begun. It’s only been a couple of weeks since he saw her last, but he still feels it. He’d like to be with her, to be distracted by her presence. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to make a decision about the future.

Because that’s what this feels like. Even though Betty tells him it’s not that big of a deal, it _feels_ like a big deal. 

Logically, sophomore year is when he should begin to start taking the necessary courses for his major. He’s not sure of the specifics, but he knows he doesn’t have enough resources to stretch his degree out any longer that four years (he already knows he’ll have to take a few summer or winter courses, in order to make everything fit.) 

He’s got to make a decision. 

He feels like picking English is a cop-out, and he tells Betty as much.

She folds a pair of jeans and makes a face at him.

“Why is it a cop-out?”

Jughead waffles, bobs his head back and forth. “What am I going to do with an English degree?”

“You could do anything with an English degree,” she argues.

It’s a little different for Betty. Over the summer she’d confided in him that she was leaning toward psychology. She thought—she caveated the statement with many effusions of “I’m not sure, I don’t have to decide quite yet, I can think about it a little later”—she might be interested in becoming a therapist.

This makes sense to Jughead. Betty _has_ a therapist; presumably she understands how therapy works. 

Betty has always been able to see the larger picture, or a longer view, in a way Jughead has never really felt capable of. 

There’s a fear he carries, that he will box himself in. That he will pick something, and it will be the wrong choice. He is afraid of making a mistake, and the negative repercussions of that mistake undulating outwards, making his life a hell.

He tells Betty this. He feels like he struggles to fully convey the idea, but Betty listens, and asks questions, and nods. 

Her laundry is long put away, but she still kneels at the side of her bed, arms folded and resting in front of her, chin kneading gently into her bicep as she thinks. Betty has a thinking face, one Jughead recognizes fondly as he watches her. 

“Okay,” she says slowly. “Counterpoint. Maybe there is no right decision _or_ wrong decision. There’s just...the decision you make. It has no inherent value.” Her eyes roam somewhere above the lens of her laptop’s camera, clearly in thought. “I’m not really sure I’m explaining this well, but it’s something like…” 

She trails off. Jughead is silent. 

“Okay,” she begins again. “Refraining from the choice gives you a sense of control over that choice, right? You still have options, and by not making the choice, you feel like you’re also not making the _wrong_ choice. Because you believe there _is_ a wrong choice.” She inhales and Jughead watches as her shoulders rise and fall with the motion. 

“But if you never make a choice, you never move forward, Jug. You’re stuck.”

.

  
  


He’s in the kitchen when Betty returns from her run.

She enters through the back door, slightly out of breath. Her cheeks are red, and several wisps of hair have escaped out of her ponytail, and backlit by the setting sun like this, he’s reminded of a halo. 

He gets up from the table, leaving both his mug of coffee and Frankie—mid-sentence—and walks over to her where she drinks a glass of water at the sink.

For a moment he leans his hip against the counter. He waits until she’s placed her glass into the sink before putting his hand on the back of her neck and pulling her close, kissing her.

Frankie whistles at them, and Jughead ignores him.

.

Sunday, after their hungover Saturday, is quiet. He finishes an essay, and Betty does some assigned reading. 

They cook pasta together, and when Betty tells him, “That’s not how you make cacio e pepe, Jug,” he continues to grate pecorino into each bowl in turn, and tells her he knows—he’s just never quite gotten the hang of the proper way. 

“It always turns out too gooey. This is good, I promise.” 

She humors him, but when she twirls her fork into her spaghetti and brings it to her mouth, she nods at him in approval.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. No one is more surprised than me.
> 
> Share with me your thoughts. Thank you <3


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty goes abroad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to several friends, and notably to heavyliesthecrown, for thoughtful advice.

_You only are free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all._

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Betty’s alarm buzzes, she turns it off quickly. She climbs out of her narrow bed carefully, but Jughead doesn’t even shift.

(He hadn't slept on his red eye, and sat awake for four hours in the Dublin Airport during his layover, too cautious to snooze in the emptiness of a predawn terminal.)

She leaves him a post-it note stuck to the screen of his phone where it lays charging at the foot of the bed.

She laces her running shoes, and closes the door behind her quietly. 

She jogs slowly through the quiet of the morning, cutting between Merton and Corpus Christi and into the meadow, all the way down to the river. She meets the rest of the W2 eight at the boathouse, and together they _one-two-three_ _heave_ , lift the boat out of its rack, and carry it out to the water.

.

The streets are a little busier as she jogs back, and the early morning mist has burned off in the sunshine. She loops once around the Camera, feeling a need to burn off a nervous yet happy energy. 

When she returns to her room, Jughead is still asleep. His phone has moved to the bedside table, and the post-it removed, so she knows he’s been awake.

She sets her kettle to boil quietly, measuring out seventeen grams of coffee beans. After she pours them into the hand-grinder, she steps out into the hallway to grind them, closing the door behind her.

Once back in her room, she places the grinder on the counter next to the now quiet kettle, and sits at her desk.

She falls into her essay. She’s unaware of how much time passes, but her head pops up at the sound of Jughead’s quietly groggy _good morning_ from the bed. 

She smiles at him, nods her head toward the kettle. “The water’s hot, and the Aeropress is in the cabinet above.”

“Thanks,” he tells her as he climbs out of bed. She feels the warmth of his palm across her shoulder as he passes her.

She returns to her essay, only popping her head up briefly when Jughead places a cup of coffee next to her. She smiles and thanks him, takes a sip. One sugar.

The cup is half-empty by the time she closes her laptop again. Mug in hand, she turns sideways in her chair, rests her arm across the back of it.

Jughead leans back against her headboard, sipping his own mug of coffee and scrolling through his phone. He smiles when he looks up at her. “C’mere.”

“I have both run and rowed today, Jug, I’m not getting back in that bed until I shower,” she tells him with a smile.

“How far did you go?”

“Not far. The river’s only ten, twelve minutes. It’s the rowing that’s sweaty.”

Jug scrunches his nose, takes another sip. “Nice.”

.

She gets him for more than a full week this time. It’s perhaps not enough to make up for the fact that she hasn’t seen him in the flesh since January, but still. _Still_ , she thinks. 

.

Betty first comes to consider spending her junior year in Oxford about halfway through her sophomore year at Columbia. 

Brigitte tells her about Berlin, and her plans to spend the fall semester there.

It’s not until Betty’s chatting one the phone with Polly later, when her sister interrupts to ask, “Where would you want to go?” 

Betty’s initial instinct is to shake her head and demur—but she’s learned her first instinct is not always the correct one.

Polly is patient as Betty takes a quiet moment before responding. She can hear what sounds like rhythmic chopping in the background. It’s only six o’clock in San Francisco; Polly must be making dinner.

“I don’t know.”

.

But when she takes a moment to explore the options available to her, it’s Oxford that jumps out.

She hasn’t taken any language electives since high school, and so feels obligated to nix most of mainland Europe, for which this is a requirement. 

She’s logical. She considers what her parents might allow her to do. 

She is an adult, but she often still feels like she’s some sort of in-between. She can vote, and yet she’s still a dependent. She has no real income; she’s a student. 

She does her own taxes, but that’s only because once she’d officially gotten a part-time role at sixteen, her mother had sat her down in early March and walked her through a paper Form 1040EZ with a yellow number two pencil and Betty’s TI-84 graphing calculator.

(Her inaugural filing had garnered her a return worth nine dollars and forty-eight cents. She joked about not even depositing it, but her mother had balked.)

She worked a few hours a week at the _Register_ during high school summers, and while it was a family business where she could ostensibly have been paid under the table, her mother had insisted upon keeping her legitimate—it’d be a learning experience for Betty, she’d argued to her then-husband. 

Any international study would technically be funded by her parents, who’d also made most of the contributions to her college fund over the years. 

So: English-speaking countries.

_Australia, New Zealand?_ Too far away.

_Ireland?_ Possible.

When she sees Oxford on the list, it feels obvious. Her parents are proud that their youngest child attends an Ivy League institution. Betty’s always been a bit embarrassed at what she’s perceived of as their concern with status.

One of the world’s oldest and more prestigious universities? The Coopers would approve. 

.

But then...there’s Jughead.

Once she begins to consider the possibilities, she hits this stumbling block. It feels more emotional than intellectual. Betty knows that were she to tell Jughead she wanted to spend the year in the UK, he’d only encourage her.

But she worries. Sometimes, he’s a little too selfless. He gives a lot of himself—to Betty, to his sister, to his father. 

She loves him, and loves that they are together, and tries to think through how to approach this.

.

“You know, I’ve never even been to Canada?” Jughead waves his hand over his shoulder, toward the wall behind Betty’s headboard. This technically is east, but Betty doesn’t want to be pedantic; the border is only a few hours north. “Maybe I can finally get a passport.”

He smiles at her, and Betty feels like her throat might close up from joy.

.

It does not occur to Betty that leaving Columbia, flying across the ocean, and studying for a year at a very, very, very old institution would amount to an experience that feels so similar to her freshman year at Columbia.

But it _is_ like that. At minimum, she has the assurance that she’s survived this once; she surely can do it again. That was practice; this is the show. 

There are a few other Columbia undergrads scattered throughout town, but they’re all assigned to different colleges. She meets them at a welcome pub night before term officially begins.

At the King’s Arms, she recognizes no one. Columbia is large; the odds that she’d be in the same study abroad program as someone she’d already met before seems possible, but unlikely. 

Thankfully, her college assigns her a peer advisor named Rosie. 

Rosie shows Betty the lay of the land. _The college dinner is uncharacteristically good, and it’s cheap—you should attend formal dinner frequently, if you’d like. Re-up your dining card in the college bar, down those stairs. Stake your spot in the library early: carrels go quickly and once people are entrenched, they’ll make themselves at home for the duration of term. Don’t walk on this lawn—they scatter ashes here; but you can walk on this lawn, there’s a croquet set if you play._

A walkable quad is a rare thing in Oxford, Rosie tells her. _Just don’t lay down a blanket, the gardening staff prohibits that. The squash court is that way. We call this the Wilderness_ , and Rosie points toward a small spot full of trees and flowers and brush that seems artificially tamed and ironically named. 

She struck by the hint of a thought, but it’s not until several weeks later that it begins to gestate into an idea. Betty begins to realize that there is likely no spot on this island that hasn’t been touched by human hands, even if so much of it that she’s seen in her as yet limited time here appears still pastoral, preserved. Old—but old differently, somehow. 

She thinks about Riverdale’s woods and how sometimes during a run, she’ll slow down and take in her surroundings, breathe in the smell of the air and listen to the sounds of the trees around her. 

Riverdale is a region full of old-growth trees. Twenty miles south, or forty miles west, and the land might have been settled by Europeans hundreds of years earlier. Its trees would have been decimated in the name of civilization. Its native population—the Uktena—would have suffered mistreatment by colonists decades before they would ultimately be dealt a same fate. 

Britain suddenly seems so much smaller to her. Manageable. 

Oxford is a bubble in the way Riverdale is a bubble. 

She can do this, she thinks. 

.

Rosie introduces Betty to several of her friends. There is Ian, there is Diarmuid, there is Niall, and Beth, and (confusingly) there is Rose. 

These people—while friendly—do not automatically become her friends.

Betty finds making friends in Oxford even more difficult than making friends at Columbia had been. Once again, she feels like a rug has been pulled out from underneath her.

Still—she tries. She reminds herself she has no control over what these people think. If they believe her a brash and ugly American—so be it. She decides she will not spend a year here alone. She will not let herself. 

.

When she video chats Jughead for the first time, she cries.

They’ve texted frequently since she’d arrived, but once she sees him, pixelated on her laptop screen, she finds herself sobbing.

She isn’t expecting it. 

“Hey, hey,” Jughead says. “It’s okay.”

She’s only able to nod. He’s patient with her. When she’s finally able to speak again, she snuffles wetly. 

“I know. I’m okay,” she tells him. “I just...wasn’t expecting to feel like this, actually.”

Jughead nods. 

“It _is_ nice,” she tells him. She pauses. She tries to think about things that have happened that are good. “I had a really nice first meeting with my first tutor.”

“That’s great!” Jughead smiles at her, and her heart feels warm. His grin seems wider, like he’s trying to account for the distance and the slight distortion of the screen. 

Wiping her nose, she collects herself, reaches across her desk for a tissue.

“I haven’t cried yet. I don’t know where this is coming from.” She’s silent, collecting herself, thinking, and Jughead’s gaze seems patient. “I think it’s just...when I see you. Or home.”

He nods. 

.

Her first meeting had indeed gone well.

She walks the Botley Road west—past the business school, past the train station—to Osney, a postage stamp of an island with a three-street grid. 

Her tutor—a youngish, bright-eyed blonde woman with cat-eye glasses who introduced herself as Dr. Joseph—had opened the door to her home and ushered Betty into her office.

Betty had taken a seat at a small round table surrounded by books, and Dr. Joseph had handed her a reading list, talked a bit about Betty’s previous courses of study, which libraries she might find most useful and upcoming lectures she might consider attending, shared her first assignment, and sent her on her way. 

She heads back into town, her brain busy. She bypasses the college gate and heads directly to Blackwell’s, where she buys a stack of primary texts. 

The next morning she heads to the Bodleian, and there she begins to read.

.

She takes him to Browns, in the Covered Market. They sit in the window and watch people walk through the stalls. Jughead nearly salivates when the waitress places a plate laden with a full English breakfast in front of him. 

“I told you,” Betty smiles.

Afterwards, she brings him over to Moo Moo’s. “It’s not Pop’s, but they’re good.”

He orders Aero Mint, and she opts for a Cadbury Flake.

.

After breakfast—Blackwell’s.

She knows he will like wandering through a bookstore, and indeed—within ten minutes of their arrival, she’s already lost track of him.

She does not panic. 

She’d once lost him during a street fair in Little Italy. The day had been hot and the street—closed off to traffic to allow only pedestrian access—had been packed full of bodies.

He’d discovered his phone charger was broken when they’d awoken in her bed that morning—but with 45% battery life, he’d shrugged it off and said he’d buy another one when he got to Penn Station that evening.

And now she knew, she just _knew_ his phone was dead, and that she could not text him to ask where he was.

He knows how to get back to her dorm, but before her mind followed this thread too far, she remembered: several blocks behind them there’d been a row of food stalls.

And indeed, there she finds him, buying a sausage sandwich, the heat of the grill blurring the air above it.

When she calls his name, he turns and spreads his arms wide. She can’t suppress her smile.

“You want one?” he asks her, and she shakes her head. She rolls her eyes fondly, but they’re behind her sunglasses, so he doesn’t see. 

.

And so now, she considers. 

The fourth floor: used books.

He’s leafing through a copy of _Jude the Obscure_ , and when he spots her, he says, “I figured I should read something locationally relevant.” He considers. “Not sure I’m into Hardy, though.” 

.

Autumn—and Michaelmas term with it—passes in a blink of the eye.

She spends mornings working in her room; afternoons in tutorials, or lectures, or working in the library. Every night she attends formal hall; she pulls her black robe over whatever she happens to be wearing, and is thankful she’s not at one of those colleges that requires the full rigamarole of a uniform every evening. 

(Rosie is right: the food is much better than she’d expected it to be. She finds it somewhat uncomfortable to be served a three-course meal by a full staff, but she tries to smile and say thank you whenever a plate is placed in front of her. They tease her for being so very American, but she thinks it’s more likely the Cooper in her.)

She’s likely never worked so much in her life, she feels, even if the coursework—because of the structure and restrictions of Columbia’s undergraduate psychology program requirements—is in essence purely elective.

She pulls more all-nighters in her first two terms than she had her previous two years of college, and a four full years of high school before that, combined. 

A concerned-seeming text from Jughead at three-thirty in the morning is a not infrequent occurrence.

On one particular night, she wonders if his phone’s predictive text algorithm has caught onto him, and if when he types _why are_ , his phone supplies _you awake??_ , two question marks and all. 

But Betty knows Jughead likely has predictive text turned off on his phone. Surely he likes coming up with his own thoughts; he’s a writer. He’s got some of their generation’s natural distrust of AI and the corporations that utilize it. She thinks under the right circumstances, he might even be a little paranoid in his distrust of power. 

It’s not until she realizes she’s been staring at his text for nearly ten minutes, not yet having responded and wondering if her boyfriend makes a habit of scrolling through some of the darker conspiracy theory rabbit holes of Reddit, that she decides she perhaps needs to call it a night.

.

Her schedule is her own; she is free to dedicate as much time to her academic and research pursuits as she feels. 

For the first three weeks of term, she has difficulty modulating. She finds herself exhausted when she drags herself out of bed in the morning to run. The mornings _themselves_ are getting darker. Riverdale’s pretty far upstate, but here she’s on an even higher latitude. 

There’s a process of figuring out what someone wants from you, and what you want from them, that’s she’s never truly had to consider within an academic setting. It’s always come so naturally to her. Or, she supposes, she’d simply begun to learn how to do things a certain way from an early age. 

.

She’s coming off an all-nighter and lacking confidence in her essay when she meets Ijeoma for the first time, as they cross paths on the stoop of Dr. Joseph’s house. 

Betty recognizes her from formal hall, but has not yet spoken to her. She introduces herself, and does not cringe when she hears herself share a very American _nice to meet you_. 

But Ije doesn’t tease her. She widens her eyes conspiratorially and leans in to warn Betty _sotto voce_ that Dr. Joseph is perhaps not in the best mood today—something about an escaped cat. 

Betty instinctively rears her head back a little, essay on her mind, an unthinking “well shit,” falling from her mouth.

This seems to make Ije laugh. Betty thanks her for the tip, and Ije waves goodbye over her shoulder. 

.

Toward the end of November, she feels she’s hit a stride—and then she realizes.

As week six of term turns into week seven, there it is: Thanksgiving.

She knows it’s there, but in the rush of her work and her reading and her attempts to keep her head above water, she has forgotten.

There’s a small group of American students who are hosting a dinner, but she hadn’t signed up to attend when the email had gone around.

Instead she spends more time than she can afford given the crush of end-of-term work to do—odd moments on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, when she can’t stop herself—scrolling through social media, and feeling alone.

On Veronica’s instagram, she spots what she’s almost positive is a glimpse of Jughead, in the third photo in a carousel of snaps Veronica has posted from what looks like a party at the Clayton house.

She pinches her fingers on her screen, zooms in, and stares hard at his ear. 

.

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, she runs north. 

The run is long. There’s pasture, and more pasture, and the occasional bus stop or house hidden behind a hedge.

When she reaches an arched and palatial-seeming gate, she finally checks the map on her phone to see where she’s ended up.

She passes through the grounds of Blenheim, and then heads back toward Oxford. Her pace slows when she’s halfway back, and then she stops.

She catches a bus that takes her the rest of the way back, hoping off when she recognizes St. Giles out the window. 

.

But then it’s over. 

Before Betty realizes what is happening, she finds herself on a British Airways flight back to the US. 

Jughead insists on picking her up from the airport. She argues that the drive to JFK from Riverdale is too long—but he simply brushes aside her every argument. 

He’s coordinated with her parents, he tells her, and she feels a little amused at the image of Jughead communicating with her mother in any formal or informal way. _Did they text?_

But he’s there—just beyond security but not yet at the luggage carousels, and Betty feels like this might be the closest she’s ever been to having a romcom moment. 

She wants to jump upon him, to wrap her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and squeeze. He will have to carry her out of this airport like a barnacle upon his back.

But she doesn’t. Her throat tightens and she tries not to beam, but when he smiles upon spotting her, her cheeks feel sore from the wideness of her smile. She thinks she might cry, and she feels a little embarrassed. 

But he hugs her, and her toes brush the floor. It’s enough—it should be enough—but she wants more. 

She’s jittery nearly the entire drive north. When they’re nearly an hour out from home, he asks her if she wants to go directly to Elm Street.

She hadn’t before then considered anything else, but now she scoffs. 

He hasn’t worked at the drive-in for several summers, and it’s closed during the offseason—but she knows he still has a key to the projection booth, and she likes that he blushes when she asks him to confirm this. 

.

Winter break is longer than she is used to, but it also seems to last no more than a few days.

There’s Christmas itself—but Polly has stayed on the west coast to spend the day with her boyfriend’s family, and Charles only travels up from DC for forty-eight hours. 

They spend the morning with their mother on Elm Street, and then have dinner with their father at the restaurant in the Five Seasons.

She sees the Lodges across the dining room, but only gets a chance to tightly squeeze Veronica into a hug when she escapes briefly to the bathroom.

.

She spends time at Pop’s with Kevin. She goes to the movies with Veronica, before V heads to Colorado for a week with her parents. One afternoon, Cheryl drags her over to the Centerville Mall (“It’s the north country, cousin, the options are slim. We both know this.”) 

She spends time with Jughead. 

.

He’s picked up a few shifts at Pop’s over the break, but his days are mostly free. 

When his father works the day shift, they spend time in the trailer. 

When her mother goes back to work after the holiday, they spend time at her house.

She feels almost nostalgic. They haven’t had such a span of empty days since college started.

.

About five days after she’s returned to Oxford, Betty finally realizes something is a little wrong.

It starts small, so small she doesn’t even notice it. She’s always a little thirsty, she runs; hydration has never really been an issue. 

But then she starts to pay attention, and when she realizes she’s peed four times in less than twenty-five minutes, she thinks _fuck_. 

.

It’s happened before, and it’s gone away on its own. It’s the start of term, she’s busy—she hopes it’ll disappear again.

It doesn’t disappear. 

.

She takes the bus up toward Headington, past Oxford Brookes.

She’s so uncomfortable that she finds herself crying in a small clinic room, and the NHS doctor—who calls her _love_ and pats her gently on the shoulder—gives her a script for something called nitrofurantoin.

She’s angry that she let it get that bad. She’s angry with herself. What if she’d fucked up her kidneys, just because she didn’t treat a UTI in a timely fashion? 

She takes the nitrofurantoin twice a day for seven days, and after four days she thinks she begins to feel a bit normal again. 

The anger has faded, but now she feels a little sad—sad to have been so angry in the first place.

She thought she was better, that she’d done better.

.

Over after-dinner pints on the patio at the Turf, she asks if he wants to go to the movies, and they find themselves in the theater near Gloucester Green, watching the first summer blockbuster release of the season.

It's familiar. It reminds Betty of visiting Jughead at the Twilight. He’d run a popcorn movie first, and then the late night movie was always something a little more out there—a B movie, or an eighties slasher. 

Jughead slouches down in his seat, stretching his legs out in front of him. It’s a beautiful Saturday night out and the theater, even though it’s small, is only really a third full. It’s a late showing. 

Betty pushes up the armrest that separates them, and edges closer. He rests his cheek on her head as the lights dim.

.

On a Saturday morning several weeks into Hilary term, she takes the bus to London with Ijeoma, and from there they find their way to Ije’s family home in Wimbledon.

It’s early afternoon when they arrive. They’ve both stuffed Waitrose sandwiches into their mouths, but Ijeoma’s mother pulls them both into the kitchen and puts a full plate in front of each of them. Betty only recognizes the jollof rice, but she dives in nevertheless.

She meets Ije’s sister Ola, and her father, who asks Betty about New York.

It reminds Betty a bit of being at Archie’s house, in a way she can’t place.

.

By eight-thirty, Ije and Betty, along with Ola, have summoned a cab into the city.

They don’t wait long in a line outside of the club, and when they finally enter (a combined ￡30 lighter), the temperature is instantly several degrees higher, and humid, and almost hazy in the low light. 

.

Betty loses track of time. Ije pulls her onto the floor, and she dances, and drinks, and dances.

Suddenly it is after midnight, and she’s in the queue for the bathroom, prompted by Jughead’s near-nightly _why-are-you-awake_ text.

She responds _hii im clubbing and I’m a little bit drunkl but I wanted to say hi i love you_.

To Veronica she sends a selfie, taken earlier in the night before they’d left the house. Betty has never been clubbing in New York beyond the single time Veronica had dragged her out freshman year. Veronica texts back quickly ( _yaaaaaas_ 👯). 

In the privacy of a stall she angles her phone just so, pulls the collar of her top slightly lower, cants her head ever so slightly, lets her eyes soften—and proceeds to take a series of selfies in which these parameters shift slightly with every frame, until her efforts are interrupted by a response from her boyfriend.

_don’t be getting naked in that bathroom now_. He uses a bashful-seeming emoji, and so she knows he’s not totally worried—at least, Betty _thinks_ it’s bashful, her eyes skim over it quickly before she’s already responding. 

_Howd you knopw I’m in the bathroom?_ , followed by several heart emojis—red, blue, two yellow, red again. 

Her own heart races when she sees the three dots that indicate he is typing; she feels the back of her neck flush and realizes the tension in her jaw is due to the wideness of her smile. She bites her lip and his response appears on her screen:

_I can see the toilet in that third shot_

She laughs loudly, and someone pounds on the door of the stall impatiently.

.

When she wakes up, it’s nearly eleven in the morning. She’s cocooned in a quilt, and beside her Ije’s pulled a pillow firmly over her own head.

She can hear Ije’s parents. When she leans to peer out the window next to the bed, she can see her father in the back garden, trowel in hand. 

A text from Jug awaits on her phone, imploring her to _drink some water_. She responds with the glass-of-water emoji, the sleeping emoji, and a simple _ugh_ in quick succession. 

When she replaces her phone on the table beside her, she briefly feels a wave of panic. She closes her eyes, and then opens them, surveys the ceiling. She breathes deeply. 

It’s Sunday. She’s fine. She can do this.

She spends most of the bus ride home taking notes on her reading, as Ije snoozes quietly beside her. 

(She abstains from running again until Tuesday, and spends much of Monday afternoon in the college library, at a carrel that sits empty but clearly has a regular tenant, someone—if the book stacks lining the walls of the desk are anything to go by—who seems to be studying some kind of physical chemistry. There are no less than two dirty coffee cups, accompanying saucers, and one dessert plate, each carrying the college’s crest, abandoned among the texts.

She’ll occasionally return to the same carrel throughout the rest of term. She never crosses paths with her fellow student, but the collection of china grows by several more plates, and even a few pieces of flatware.)

.

Her mom mentions something about selling the house on Elm Street, and Betty loses track of the conversation.

She thinks about Riverdale, about growing up there, about running over every inch of that town. She thinks about playing in the sandbox behind the Andrews house with Archie. She thinks about meeting Veronica when she moved to town in middle school—this cosmopolitan preteen from the Upper West Side. She thinks about milkshakes with Kevin.

She thinks about Jughead, about the projection booth at the drive-in. 

She thinks about her childhood bedroom.

She realizes her mother has gone silent in her ear, and with great effort brings herself back into the present.

“It won’t be for a few more years,” her mother says. Betty’s heart continues to beat— _tha-thunk, tha-thunk, tha-thunk_ —inside her chest. “I’d like everyone to be fully settled before I do anything.”

Charles is settled, Polly is settled. Her father is renting in Greendale, true—but they’ve already decided her mother will get the house.

It’s Betty. Her mother wants Betty to be settled—whatever _settled_ might mean—before selling the house in Riverdale. 

She feels panic; she feels relief. She can’t distinguish between the two, they feel so similar. 

Her mother moves onto another topic—something about restoration of the town pool, and Betty breathes in for a count of four, holds for a count of four, breathes out for a count of eight—hand over the microphone, so her mother will not hear. 

.

She hasn’t lived in Riverdale for much more than a few months over the past two-plus years. 

Jughead’s family is in Riverdale.

She tries to observe these thoughts, and to let them drift past her. 

She turns to her laptop, pulls up the essay she has yet to finish, and rereads it before continuing. 

.

She does not fly home during the gap between Hilary and Trinity.

At Rose’s urging, she signs up to row on one of the more casual boat teams.

“We need an eighth. You’re the right weight and height, and I already know you’re conditioned.”

It gives her some scheduling structure. She wakes early, runs down the river, exerts herself, and runs back. 

It’s nice, seeing the same group of people every day. It almost reminds her of high school. The camaraderie of a cross country team in suburban New York is different from this team—six British women, one German, one American, a tiny Scottish cox named Sylvie, keeper of a tinny speaker to amplify her voice, and their peer coach—but there’s a muscle memory that soothes as much as it aches.

.

She hasn’t seen Dr. Glass since January, but they email. In late April, she sneaks in a phone call—surreptitiously, because per Dr. Glass’s practice and her insurance policy, they cannot work together when Betty is outside of the country. 

“It sounds by your actions that you are really handing it much better than you think you are,” Dr. Glass tells her, and Betty does not know how to respond. 

.

“I didn’t know England could get so hot.”

She can see a little patch of sweat between his shoulders, bleeding through his t-shirt. It’s eighty-six degrees (“Excuse you, Betts—it’s thirty degrees.” She laughs at him despite herself), and they walk through Jericho and across Walton Well Road, where they catch up with Ije at the south entrance of Port Meadow.

There’s about a dozen or so of them, and they spread blankets and towels over the grassiest patch close to the river they can find, as free of cow pats as possible, and bask in the sun.

When she feels like she’s going to finally sweat through her bathing suit, she wades into the water.

It’s frigid, but it feels nice to move in the water, to be weightless again. When the bottom finally drops out from underneath her and she’s treading water, she begins to swim out for the other side.

It’s not nearly as wide as the Sweetwater, and so it takes her only a few minutes. She turns around and swims back, to find Jughead swimming toward her.

.

There’s soft cheese, and two baguettes Niall’s bought from the Sainsbury’s Local, and red pepper hummus with fresh pita (“Why do you spell it with two Ts?” Jughead asks Ije, and she scoffs at him in jest), and Rosie has prepared a sweating plastic pitcher full of Pimm’s. 

After they’ve eaten, and there have been many loud cross-conversations, and Diarmuid has challenged Rose to a race and lost, and they’ve all quieted down and laid themselves out in the sun—only then does Betty close her eyes and fall asleep.

.

Leaving the others behind, they walk north through the meadow. 

Jughead tries to convince Betty to take a short-cut, across the green, but she’s hesitant. She’s run through the meadow many times, but it still seems vast enough to get lost in. 

Her fears are confirmed when—not ten feet off the path—he starts to sink into the mire. 

His eyes go wide, and Betty can’t help but laugh loudly as he scrambles backwards. 

Betty can hardly control herself. She’s sun-drunk and feels hysterical, and soon she’s actually bent double with her hands on her knees, gasping for breath.

When she calms down, Jughead seems cheerful despite her amusement and the mud that now covers his shoes and lower calves. She snuffles, wipes her eyes on her sleeves, and reaches out for his hand.

“I told you.”

.

They walk north—strictly path-bound—and the meadow seems to go on and on and on. 

Jughead tells her about the story he is writing.

“It’s not for school,” he says. “Not really sure what it’s about yet.”

“What happens in it?” she asks, and he tells her the series of events that make up his story, the characters, how they are related to one another, how they act when they are alone, how they act when they are together. He caveats some of this with asides like, “I’m thinking it might be,” or “This isn’t set in stone, but.” 

She’s silent, listening closely. When he pauses occasionally, she asks questions, and she’s silent as he seems to consider his response. Sometimes his response comes in the form of a question for her. 

Before Betty realizes it, they find themselves in Wolvercote.

.

It takes them much longer to get back to college than Betty anticipates. 

By the time she’s swiping her fob at the gate, it’s after midnight, her feet feel sore in her sandals, and the night porter’s begun his shift.

Betty waves to him in silent hello as she holds the gate open for Jughead. Behind them, a bike whizzes down Broad Street and the sound gradually fades into the silence of the night. 

The sun hasn’t even been set for that long, and she marvels again how much further north they are, latitudinally-speaking, from Riverdale. 

.

Once they’ve dropped their bags in her room, she leads him down the hall to the bathroom.

They pull off their clothes. They’re covered in much more mud than she’d realized. It’s between her toes, on the backs of their calves. 

(The meadow has horses, and cows. She chooses not to dwell too much on what else besides mud might have been in that water.)

She turns the spigot of the shower, holding her hand underneath the spray, waiting for the temperature of the water to rise. 

The day is hot; the night is cool.

“All yours,” she tells him when it’s warm enough.

He merely smiles at her, and nods his head toward the bath. _You first_. 

The warmth of the water feels wonderful. They trade places, back and forth, until Jughead simply wraps his arms around her. She rests her chin on his shoulder, wraps her own arms around his torso, and they stand under the fall of the water together. 

.

She’s reluctant to leave the warm cocoon of the shower, of Jughead’s arms, but when she feels his breath on her neck, and his lips brush against her ear, something even warmer swirls around the lower part of her spine, even though the water itself has begun to cool. 

.

Checking for an empty hall, she gestures an _all clear_ back to him.

Wrapped in towels, they sprint down the corridor, nearly failing to keep their laughter quiet in the dark of the hall, and stumble into her room in a fit of hushed giggles.

Betty drops her clothes into the hamper, collects Jughead’s from his arms to drop them there as well, and pulls her towel from her body. She folds it carefully in half, drapes it on the rail behind her door, watching Jughead’s face all the while. After a moment he mimics her. He hands her his folded towel, and she hangs it next to hers.

She tip-toes closer to him, wraps her arms around his neck, and presses her torso against the warmth of his, still damp from the shower. 

She runs her nose the length of his and breathes. She hears herself sigh audibly. His lips move to meet hers, and she smiles when her feet leave the ground.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph is from a 1973 interview Maya Angelou did with Bill Moyers. The original epigraph was from Robert Browning ( _Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there_ ), before I realized this weekend is in June.
> 
> Thanks for your patience with this chapter.


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jughead makes plans.

_But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!_

.

The Lodge Lodge is somehow both smaller _and_ larger than Jughead remembers. 

The logic strikes him as funny. He has not been here since high school. _Senior prom after-party_ , he thinks, although the memory is a little hazy. Perhaps it’s simply less crowded. 

But it’s a quiet, secluded place, and he is here with his girlfriend and several thousand words left to write and revise for his thesis. 

.

Jughead has never participated in a traditional spring break, but nor does he have any desire to do so. He doesn’t know many people who actually do travel south to Florida or the Carolinas for the week. 

Betty has also never shown any interest, and so they’ve typically spent the time together (except for last year, when Betty was out of the country.) 

But this year, she has a different idea. 

It’s not Riverdale, it’s not Albany, and it’s not New York City. It’s the middle of the woods, in the mountains—where it’s quiet, where he can work on his essay while Betty completes her own assignments. He will allow himself to be occasionally dragged away from his laptop, because Betty has always been able to distract him when he does not realize he even needs distraction. 

He will hike. He will watch movies on the couch in front of the projector screen in the lodge’s finished basement (he hadn’t discovered this particular treat in high school), and he will cook dinner with Betty. 

.

In his defense, he’s never built a fire before. _Throw a log on_ , he’d thought, not realizing the pure power of a single wood stove. 

They open several windows. Despite the early spring chill that’s still in the air, the entire first floor of the lodge remains a solid furnace. 

In the kitchen, Betty strips off her sweater. Jughead’s t-shirt sticks to the small of his back, and he stands beside her in his boxers. 

There is jamón ibérico and chorizo, manchego and fig jam with little crackers, and they eat and drink wine while standing at the cutting board. 

At some point Betty hauls herself up to sit on the counter, and Jughead finds his way between her legs, his mouth instinctually homing in on hers. He can taste the fig jam on her tongue.

She pulls at the shoulders of his t-shirt, and he lets her pull it over his head. 

He’s wary of security cameras—but Betty tells him “No, no—I asked V,” and he can’t so much as scan the room with a discerning eye before she’s pulling him in again.

.

He gets her off once in the kitchen, with his mouth, and then she slides down from the counter on shaky legs and pushes him toward the living room.

It’s so warm. 

The heat from the fire feels nearly solid in the air, but now he is naked and she is naked, and she pushes him onto the couch and climbs over him.

.

She comes again on top of him, and then they switch.

(There is the natural communication that comes with sex, elided and coded with a person who you know intimately and well; the shorthand of a hand on a hip, the palm pressing on a shoulder, the truncated “Can you—” paired with the lift of an eyebrow.) 

He nearly loses himself completely, but he focuses on the pulse in her throat, on her bright green eyes under fluttering eyelashes. On the beauty of her chest as it moves with her breath, and the heat of her—so different from the stifling warmth of the room around them. 

She cries again into his ear, and then he really is nearly gone.

He pulls back and spills over her stomach. 

.

When he comes to his senses, he pulls away from her to stand, and he hears a gentle whine from her throat when rushes into and out of the kitchen, a paper towel in his hand.

He gently wipes her stomach and moves to stand again, but she pulls him closer. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his hips, and then Betty pulls down the blanket that hangs across the back of the couch to cover them. She shivers despite the heat of the fire that still hangs in the air. 

“Stay, please,” she whispers in his ear, and Jughead feels the weight of his body relax as though by instinct, as Betty’s warmth holds him close.

.

When they both come back from the bathroom, and after they’ve stretched out on the bed in their guest room, and after Betty has kissed him solidly for several more minutes—she pulls back from his mouth to peer into his eyes. 

She pecks his lips once more before settling next to him, resting her head on his bicep where it stretches out under her neck. Her leg entangles with his own. 

.

At the beginning of October, Jughead finds himself in the Science Library, in the offices of Career and Professional Development.

The Science Library doesn’t necessarily have all the materials or resources he typically needs—given most of his classes fall under purview of the English department—but the building nonetheless appeals to him.

It’s wide and white, with shiny floors that your shoes click and echo across in the atrium. Everything feels ever-so-slightly larger than human-sized, in a way that is almost unsettling. He finds it interesting.

But he’s never visited career services before this day, and he feels out of place in a way that seems almost too familiar to him. 

It’s like an old acquaintance he hasn’t seen for several years, that you find yourself wishing you’d hadn’t seen for a few more years yet.

.

When Jughead was first accepted to Albany, when he found out what they’re willing to offer him in terms of financial aid, he shared the information with his father in the kitchen of the trailer.

His dad had been in the middle of frying scrambled eggs for dinner, keeping his eyes on the frying pan. But when the toast popped, Jughead noticed FP sniffle and rub his wrist against his nose before reaching for a plate. Jughead realized his father was avoiding his eyes.

He pretended not to notice. He pulled three plates from the cabinet, three forks and three knives from the cutlery drawer, and yelled down the hall to Jellybean, telling her dinner was ready.

.

Jughead tries to imagine his father now, in this airy, modern space. He tries to picture his father’s steel-toe boots crossing the quiet carpet of the study spaces, of this waiting room. It’s incongruous. He doesn’t think he can fully capture it, and he’s interrupted in the attempt when he hears his name and a counsellor waves him forward. 

He follows her, disappearing into a warren of offices.

.

The meeting leaves him overwhelmed.

Resumes, CVs, first rounds, offers, benefits, degrees—it feels like a lot to take in. 

Five minutes into his appointment, his brain begins to feel full. He wishes he’d taken out a notebook when he’d sat down, but he finds himself instead scribbling notes into the margins of the xeroxed literature his counsellor hands him, afraid leaning down to unzip his bag and dig out a notebook would disrupt what is clearly a very practiced flow of verbal information.

When he finally leaves the Science Library, twenty-five minutes later, he retreats to the dining hall for a burger. He orders two. 

.

Jughead is unsure of his plans.

As yet, he _has_ no plans. His plans consist of writing his honors thesis and graduating.

Beyond that is a vast blankness.

On occasion he wonders if he’d missed something. It sometimes feels like there’s some kind of template everyone seems to be following, and he doesn’t have the map. 

It’s like he’d skipped the day in school when that lesson had been taught, and he’s been trying to catch up ever since. 

.

It’s not something he’s discussed with anyone, although Betty has occasionally tiptoed around the topic.

He’s not sure how to explain it to her. Betty’s grad school applications are completed, submitted in full. 

She isn’t the only one who is making plans. Samm has his MCAT scores in hand, his med school preferences ranked on a spreadsheet. Even Archie’s near future appears stable—elementary education, like medicine and like psychology, follows a well-trod path.

He finds it almost funny that he—high school weirdo, tolerated stoner, kid who never followed a straight line if he could swerve—has found himself meandering and unsettled by it.

.

  
  


Jughead is not an athletic person, but he’s arrived in the wilderness of upstate New York knowing his girlfriend—as naturally a fit person as he has ever known—wanted to hike. He’s prepared to stomp through the woods for her. 

Objectively, upstate New York _is_ beautiful. The trees are lush and the greenery is fresh. The air smells fresh—like clean dirt, in a way that reminds Jughead of the way a bed of winter snow always makes the trailer park look bright and new. 

This he can do, he thinks. Still: he finds himself unable to hold off his first request for a snack break any longer than an hour and a half into their hike. 

Betty glances back at him, her hands resting on the straps of her backpack, and though her eyes narrow, her glance is not _un_ -fond when he bares his teeth at her in an exaggerated grin. 

.

They climb for another fifteen minutes—“There’s a good spot to stop just a little ahead,” Betty insists—until the woods begin to recede, and they find themselves on a gently sloping incline of solid granite.

At the top of the slope the granite bulges and rounds out, and the valley below them is a vast swathe of green.

_Okay_ , Jughead thinks. 

“This is nice,” he tells Betty, and she smiles brightly. Her nod in agreement is only a little smug.

.

Betty lays out her spread and as anticipated, it is so much more appetizing that the handful of protein bars, apples, and fruit leather he’d stuffed into his own backpack that morning.

There’s sandwiches—two for Betty, three for him—that she made as he’d showered that morning: apple, brie, and the rest of the fig jam from the night before; roast beef; and chicken salad. There are little packets of peanut butter, and bananas, and string cheese that makes Jughead think of elementary school. To his delight, as though Betty had predicted this very thought from him, there is also a bottle of chocolate milk.

He unburies his water bottle from his backpack and watches Betty as she arrays their lunch out over the granite, before laying her hoodie over the ground next to him and sitting.

She turns to him, cocks her head in the direction of the food and tells him to _eat_ , like he is Hot Dog. He laughs.

.

Jughead wakes on Thanksgiving morning with a nosebleed.

His toes are cold, despite the hot, dry air the trailer’s heater loudly pumps out. He spends five minutes blowing blood clots out of his sinuses and waiting for the flow of red to cease. 

(He thinks longingly of the neti pot Betty bought for him when his allergies had peaked over the summer, on a shelf in his bathroom in Albany.

He’d whined through its first use, under her coaxing supervision, but as soon as his ears had popped and he _breathed_ , he’d been converted.

Betty had smiled smugly, drying the pot with a paper towel.

She’d moved to give it back to him, but suddenly drew her hand back sharply, startling him.

“Distilled. Water,” she intoned, pointing at him, her eyes serious. “Not tap, _not_ boiled. Distilled.” Her eyes were wide and imploring. “You can get it at the pharmacy.”

He’d widened his own eyes in understanding and nodded. 

“Distilled,” she repeated when she finally relinquished the pot to him. “Brain-eating amoebas.”)

When he finally shuffles into the kitchen, Jellybean tells him he sounds “like a demented goose.” Still, she fills a pot with water and puts it on the stovetop to boil, as he pours himself a mug of coffee.

He leans against the counter and sips. “Nosebleed Season would be a good band name,” he says. 

JB chews her toast and vigorously nods her agreement. “Hell yeah.”

.

As they have for many years, the Joneses pile into FP’s pick-up and drive across town to join the Andrews family for Thanksgiving dinner.

JB carries a store-bought pumpkin pie, Jughead a bag of Hawaiian sweet rolls. 

Fred is head chef of the Andrews household on Thanksgiving, and when he welcomes the Joneses into the house, he tells them the turkey has been brined for a full thirty-six hours this year.

A fragrant mix of aromas waft from the kitchen, savory and like something comfortingly familiar. Jughead feels his stomach rumble.

Fred claps his shoulder. “I heard that, son,” he says, and Jughead smiles at him.

.

After dinner, and after they sit in conversation for thirty minutes, he helps carry the dishes back into the kitchen. 

Archie dons a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves that go up to his elbows, and dives right into washing the dishes in the sink. Jellybean attempts to keep counter space clear by drying each dish quickly.

Jughead scrapes leftovers into plastic gallon bags and into tupperware, before his father comes in from the living room and nudges him toward the back door.

“Go—go have dessert,” he says. 

.

Jughead walks around the side of the house and to the Coopers’ front door. Something about entering through the rear door, with everyone there, feels odd. 

When he texts Betty, the door swings open within thirty seconds. She rolls her eyes at him fondly and pulls him inside by the elbow.

The Coopers—and a man Jughead doesn’t recognize—stand around the kitchen island in a circle. 

Charles shakes his hand (“How are you, Jughead?” he asks. Something has always seemed oddly formal about Betty’s brother, but Jughead long ago chalked it up to the fact that he is a fed.) 

Polly introduces him to her boyfriend, Jorge, and Betty’s mother offers him a plate with a rather large wedge of apple pie, topped with vanilla ice cream.

He thinks she says something to the group about moving to the living room, or at least back to the table, but she’s drowned out by her children. 

Jughead thinks they’d never argue with her if they weren’t _all_ there, but with three of them and the additional buffer of outsiders, it reads to Jughead as affectionate teasing. Mrs. Cooper’s cheeks are flushed, but she doesn’t seem unhappy. 

Maybe it’s to do with having all her children present. Jughead knows they had dinner with Betty’s father the previous evening, that these trades are still a delicate negotiation of time. 

But he watches Betty now. Her cheeks are also pink, and she smiles, and sips from a glass of white wine, and laughs when Charles tells Jorge a story about when they were younger, about Betty hiding in the trunk of the car when Charles left for college.

Jughead listens, watches. He digs a fork into the pie as Betty leans her hip into his, and Mrs. Cooper implores her son to play nicely and not embarrass his sister. 

.

Jughead is mostly quiet, eventually finding himself next to Charles. 

Charles has always seemed a distant figure to Jughead—so much older than he and Betty and their cohort, at least thirteen when they’d been born, fully established in his career at the FBI by the time they’d reached high school. He was more a name than a real person to Jughead, and so to find himself in conversation with Betty’s brother still feels odd. 

“What are your plans?” Charles asks him, and Jughead does not have to request he clarify. It’s a variation of a question that he’s been hearing ad nauseam for the past several months, and now that he’s nearing the end of his penultimate semester of undergrad, he only assumes he’s about to approach an onslaught. 

He digs his hands further into his jean pockets, rocks gently back onto his heels, rolls his bottom lip between his teeth. 

“Well,” he begins. He has not yet mastered evading this topic. This is his first trip back to Riverdale in his senior year. “I—,” he draws out the syllable nearly against his will, but he has no idea where this statement is headed, “...am not sure yet.”

Charles nods, and it’s so affable and nonjudgemental that Jughead feels an odd surge of kinship toward him.

“Have you considered working for the federal government?” Charles asks.

Jughead is unable to process the question fully before he hears Betty snort loudly beside him.

“I think Juggie is the _last_ person to want to work in civil service.”

Charles appears about to respond—Jughead can’t fathom what with—but then he himself is already speaking.

“Well, wait—,” he says, “what kind of security clearance do you get?”

It’s worth it for the pure, unadulterated bark of Betty’s laughter.

.

Jughead is still a bit sore from their hike the following day, but they’ve already planned to make it a working day, so he isn’t terribly worried.

Around eleven, he brings his laptop to the dining room, as yet unused during this trip. He lays out his notebook, his coffee, and his battered copy of _Moby-Dick_ , and he works. 

If he turns his head ninety degrees to the left, he can see Betty’s top knot peeking over the back of the couch, hear the gentle susurrus of the paper as she turns the pages of her book.

.

Betty asks him how the writing is going and he tells her it’s the revising he is struggling with. 

It is like he cannot bear revisiting this unfinished thing.

“Would you read what you’ve written to me?” she asks when they’re sitting on the couch after washing the dishes. Her back is to the couch’s armrest and her toes are dug under his thigh. She built the fire, and it’s far more manageable than Jughead’s effort (several years as a Brownie and then a Girl Scout have prepared her, she tells him). 

“Read me a bit,” she says. He casts her his most withering glance, but she merely grins. “Read it,” she chants.

He reads for about ten minutes, before he feels hoarse and he refuses to go on.

Betty shrugs, but doesn’t push him. “It _is_ a lot of theory,” she tells him. “But it sounds like you, at least.”

“That good?” he muses out loud, and she pushes at his thigh with her foot.

She slouches lower, until her head rests on the arm of the sofa and she digs her feet further under his thigh.

“Read me something else?” He offers to read from Melville. “Yes, but just not one of the chapters full of whale facts, please,” she asks.

“Well,” he says, “just for that you’re getting the shortest chapter in the book.”

“Noo-o-o—”

“Yeah.” He flips through his paperback, and sees Betty’s smile out of the corner of his eye. Her toes wiggle under his leg.

He rests his left palm on the soft wool of her sock-covered ankles, and with his left hand shuffles the pages.

“‘The Lee-Shore’,” he begins. 

.

Jughead’s honors thesis comes by way of a joke.

He’d been explaining his major’s requirements to Samm, who—premed—had his four years of undergrad and four years of med school already carefully plotted out. He’d pushed Jughead to suggest the most outlandish couplings of concepts, like it was a game.

“Melville?” Jughead had thrown out.

Samm had slapped the table. “Pulp fiction,” he’d added, having only two days earlier spent a Friday evening with Jughead on the couch in the living room—high as kites—indulging in a Tarantino double feature.

“American transcendentalism,” Jughead had countered. “Emerson.”

“Thoreau—civil disobedience. And…Kurosawa.” 

It wasn’t until he’d been falling asleep that evening, but the moment came back to him and he’d found it had implanted itself in his mind.

.

Nothing better had come to mind, and so Jughead finds himself once again in the office his advisor shares with another professor during office hours, stacks of books by his feet and papers to be graded nearly everywhere.

Melville, alienation, and origins of pulp literature.

His advisor cants her head and then nods slowly.

“That could work,” she says and then suddenly—he is off.

It’s due to be thirteen thousand words, and his Honors designation for his degree is contingent upon its completion. 

(It is also tied to his capstone course and closely supervised by his advisor—who also approves its final state and acceptance. His hand is held here, he reminds himself.)

“Have you thought about continuing your studies—” His advisor raises a staying hand before continuing, “not that I would wish such torture on anyone, to be clear, but I am biased toward the American Studies department and,” she gestures toward her desktop, as though his as-yet-unfinished thesis sits upon it, “I think your areas of interest lend you to it.”

.

Jughead puts this idea into the back of his brain, to pore over when he finds himself alone. 

He tries to imagine it—spending five years focused on a single pursuit or topic, dedicating his life to the short stories of Carver, or becoming an authority on an obscure nineteenth century outsider artist.

He rolls over in his bed, punches his pillow into a more comfortable shape, and stares at the spot his eyes fell, the back of his phone where it lay charging on the mattress. Slowly, he drifts to sleep.

.

After a second day spent writing at the lodge’s wide wooden table, Jughead cooks dinner.

In truth, he makes omelets. He can feed himself, but he has nowhere near the capacity Betty does for ingredients and recipes and creativity. Betty makes their toast and helps to chop the vegetables.

“Would you like a glass?”

When he looks up from the frying pan, Betty is holding up a bottle of red wine. He shakes his head.

“Nah—I’ll go for water.”

Betty reaches back into the cabinet for a tall glass. “Ice?”

“Sure,” he responds, and he flips the omelet over.

.

The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving is usually casual: some drinks with friends in their parents’ houses, milkshakes at Pop’s, catching up with a few select people of one’s particular choosing. 

Friday—and Jughead isn’t sure if this is unique to his generation, or if it is something Riverdalians have been doing for generations—is more often a bacchanal. 

It’s easier, he thinks, as he stands to the side of the room and nurses the same red solo cup of soda he’s carried for the past several hours, to be here this year.

Last year Betty had been in Oxford and he’d been dragged out to Chuck Clayton’s annual Friday-after-Thanksgiving party by Archie. He’d been designated driver then, too. 

But Betty is here again and though he still doesn’t like overly-loud parties or really even so many of the people he’d gone to high school with, even four years after he’s left them behind for Albany—he likes watching Betty.

Or rather—he likes seeing her enjoyment, he rationalizes to himself with a sip of flat coke. Betty: happy, dancing with her oldest friends in the dark of the Clayton family’s sunken den (the matriarch and patriarch of the family away on their annual Thanksgiving ski weekend), with the stereo loudly playing a Lauryn Hill song that is likely older than all of them. Maybe it’s creepy to call it watching. But still—it’s beautiful.

Archie ambles his way through the crowd and Jughead realizes he’s slowly making his way toward him, stopping every few feet to lean his head down to a friend, his ear near their mouths to speak over the music, high-fiving, sharing a bro-hug with a fellow former Bulldog or two.

Two songs pass in the time it takes Archie to lean back against Jughead’s wall and all the while Jughead has kept his gaze on Betty, sandwiched between Veronica and Val, observing Archie’s trajectory across the room out of the corner of his eye.

It’s a little bit quieter here under the stairs, and so Jughead doesn’t have to strain so much to hear when Archie leans into his ear.

“Can you give me some advice, man?” Archie intones. Jughead nods, sips his coke when he meets his eyes.

Archie bobs his head one way and then the other, like he’s looking for a place to begin, and Jughead waits him out.

“It’s Val,” Archie finally says. Jughead nods again. He knows—through the complicated grapevine of gossip that feeds him information, despite his avowed abstention from most forms of social media that convey this unspoken knowledge— Archie and Valerie have been spending time together. Archie is in Buffalo and Val is in Toronto—it tracks.

But it transpires that Archie likes Val—“I really like-her like her, Juggie,” Archie implores, and Jughead is reminded of the Andrews’ old golden Vegas, in the way Archie’s soft brown eyes widen as he speaks.

Jughead shrugs. “I don’t understand,” he says. “What exactly are you asking me?”

“Well—you and Betty—I’m not like, trying to—I dunno, _wife_ her—but I just—” Archie starts and stumbles and Jughead narrows his eyes, trying to follow along.

“I like her,” Archie eventually finishes. “I want to, you know—bring it to the next level.”

Light dawns. Jughead tilts his near-empty solo cup toward his chest, raises his eyebrows. “Are you asking me for—relationship advice?”

Archie—ever-Archie—cuffs him on the shoulder, at once indecipherable, and tells him “Yes! You understand me!”

Jughead finds himself with an almost totally blank mind.

“I—I have no idea. Why don’t you just—tell her?” He shrugs at Archie. The song changes and Jughead can hear Betty’s voice: even among the chorus, the most familiar.

Archie holds out his hands. “Because you’re in a long-term, long-distance _relationship_ , you’re the most _together_ of my friends, I dunno—why not?” He shrugs. “You always tell it straight, Juggie.”

.

Jughead drives Betty home a little after one a.m.

She’s had more to drink than him, but she’s flirty and bold more than she’s actually drunk. 

He walks her to the door of the Cooper house and she kisses him for a solid five minutes before he half-heartedly tries to extricate himself—her family is here, his father and sister are back at Sunnyside.

“No,” she whines quietly against his mouth, “stay. Sleep here. It’s cold. You’re here.”

His arms are wrapped nearly double around her shoulders and hers are tight around his torso and he feels himself smile against her kiss. She mirrors it. 

“Stay,” she whispers, and so he does.

.

They avoid the creaky step on the stairs and the house is quiet around them.

Betty gives him a spare toothbrush from a drawer, still in its package, and they brush their teeth side-by-side at the sink. Betty’s hips sway gently to a song he cannot hear, and he finishes brushing as he watches her wipe away her makeup, as she washes her face.

.

He folds his jeans over Betty’s desk chair and slides under the pile of blankets on her bed. She tucks her head under his chin, their legs tangle together, and they shift until they are comfortable.

He is asleep before he even realizes he is tired.

.

He’s up and awake before she is, and after he dresses, he leans in to kiss her and whisper a quiet goodbye.

She nods and pats his hand, turns back into her pillow, and—pleasingly, he thinks—falls back into slumber. 

Downstairs, he finds Alice and Polly awake, wearing bathrobes and slippers, talking quietly over coffee at the kitchen island.

Polly catches his eye when he steps off the final stair and he realizes he’s trapped himself. He can’t reasonably escape without saying hello, it’d be rude. He doesn’t want to be rude to Betty’s family. He wonders if there’s any greater sin to them.

He whispers _hello_ and to his surprise, Mrs. Cooper only smiles and offers him a cup of coffee. She ignores his protests, insisting he take a to-go cup. He does not argue and before he knows it, he’s exiting the Cooper house with a paper cup of coffee in hand—lid and all.

Of course they have disposable cups, he thinks. Prepared for every eventuality.

.

Betty proposes an idea. 

She tells him it’s a little more complicated than something like a pros and cons list, and asks him to clear the coffee table in the cabin’s living room, before she disappears into the kitchen.

She returns shortly, having rummaged—to Jughead’s ears—for a pad of post-its and a navy-blue sharpie (“Lodge Industries” emblazoned across its length). 

Betty places three post-its across the far edge of the table’s rectangular surface, like headings across a sheet of paper. “Want,” “Will,” “Won’t” they read.

“It’s something that came up in my Human Sexuality seminar,” she tells him. “Actually, it made me—” she pauses, flipping through the pad of post-its with her thumb as if it were a flipbook, a thoughtful look on her face as she looks down at the headings. “I thought I could…” She shakes her head and trails off. “Never mind,” she says, and then she explains what she wants of him.

He is to think of his future. Not his future career, or job, or means of financially supporting himself—but of his life, and how it could look, how he wants it to look. 

What does he want from his life? Write it on a post-it. What will he tolerate in his life, what is he open to? Post-it. What does he _not_ want? Post-it.

Betty starts with an example to show him what she is asking.

“I want to help people,” she says, writing it on a sticky note. “I am open to how I might do that—I don’t know if I just want to get an MS or a PsyD.”

“I don’t want to work with children,” she writes on another slip of paper.

.

It starts slow.

He will consider a higher degree.

The won’ts, Jughead finds, are the hardest. He doesn’t expect this, but when he thinks about it, it makes sense; it’s very like him to keep all options open.

So he tries. He won’t “work for a bank/similar corporation.”

Betty nods. “Yeah, I’d agree, for you.”

.

He wants it to feel creative.

He’s thankful Betty doesn’t push him or question him—he is not sure yet exactly what he means when he says _wants_ anything, until he writes “Be w/ Betty” and sticks it under the Want heading.

“Jug.” Betty cants her head at him, as though he is simply being obtuse, but he shakes his own head at her. His elbows rest on his knees and he drums the sharpie into his palm to a rhythm in his head. 

“No—I mean,” he starts, “I want to be with you. Where you are.”

Betty nods, but doesn’t say anything. Jughead swallows, dislodges a lump in his throat he did not notice had been building there, and continues.

“I want to be…near you. Or with you.” He looks at her, watches as she slowly rubs her lips together. He leans over the post-it and hesitates for a moment, before he scribbles untidily below “Be w/ Betty” the words “Where Betty is.” 

“Okay,” she says, “okay.” 

.

In February, Jughead—after several months of gentle suggestion from Betty, which had gradually increased in pressure as he’d found himself ever nearer to his final months of college—makes an appointment at student health services to speak with a counsellor.

He’s argued with Betty about it, if passively. Jughead has never shunned therapy—he knows it has helped Betty, he knows it’s the field she is interested in and actively pursuing (her graduate school applications are final and submitted) but he’s just always thought that it simply did not exist to help _him_. He is not depressed. He doesn't feel overly-stressed. He is fine.

Betty had pursed her lips and her gaze had gone hazy, in the way it often did when she was trying to gather her thoughts into sentences.

“I worry,” she began, “that you do not seem to—that we do not seem to be able to discuss certain things.”

Jughead had nodded. This had been something Betty had circled around before, something he had tried to push further and further off, but that did seem to him to loom, darkly.

Betty is going to graduate school. She is going to graduate school in Boston, if she gets her way, and Jughead has no doubt of her success in this endeavor.

But he cannot fathom where the world might find him in six months’ time, let alone in a year’s time.

“I think you might find an unbiased ear, without an agenda, to maybe be helpful.” 

Betty had spoken carefully. He realized she had clearly thought about how to approach this topic with him, and it is this realization that introduces the first crack.

.

“It’s toolbox work,” Betty said, and this was something he nodded at, but not really understood.

But having now met with his counsellor (“Jennifer, please,” she said at their first meeting) several times, he thinks he’s begun to understand exactly what Betty had meant.

Toolbox work was not what he thought of when he thought about therapy. It was not about what he felt. It was about what he did. _This_ , he thought— _I can do this_. 

.

Jennifer occasionally pushes him toward talking about things like _feelings_ —but usually in service of finding out what he _does_ with them.

“Who do you talk to?”

His girlfriend. His sister. His dad. His roommate Samm. Archie.

She’d nodded. “Good, that’s great.”

.

They only meet a handful of times—but he thinks it’s not a complete waste of his time. She helps him in surprisingly concrete ways.

_This is career services, this is how they work._

_Everything may follow a clearly defined template, but that doesn’t mean you have to. You are not a cog in the machine_. 

_What is the worst that could happen_? 

On this, he pauses.

_Well—this_ , he tells her, and _this_ , and then maybe _this_ , too. The possibilities present themselves to him as infinite. 

“Okay,” she nods. “And then what would you do?”

This had been where he’d momentarily stumbled. But once recovered, he’d answered: _I would do this_. 

“Okay,” she’d repeated, “and then what?”

It had continued like that for several minutes, a call and response, until Jughead realized he talked himself through an actual plan to escape a metaphorical hole.

( _Could it be that easy_ , he’d wondered, enough that he’d eventually posed this question to Betty.

“That doesn’t sound easy, Jug,” she said. “But it also doesn’t sound impossible.”)

.

A spring chill descends upon their last day at the Lodge Lodge.

Really, Jughead thinks, it’s a return to form. The mildness of their first few days had been the true fluke.

But that wide bed is so inviting and warm, and when Betty asks if he still wants to watch a movie for their final evening, he doesn’t feel bad to share her lack of enthusiasm.

They curl up into bed before nine-thirty.

But they don’t sleep. Jughead reads an out-of-date _New Yorker_ while Betty showers, but has no qualms in tossing it aside when she emerges from the bathroom sans robe, sans anything, and she climbs into his side of the bed, tucking herself underneath both the covers and his arm.

Her body is warm. He can feel it in her arms when they snake under his t-shirt, in her mouth on his neck.

.

After, they take turns in the bathroom, before burying themselves back beneath the covers. The light is dim, but his eyes adjust quickly.

“So,” Jughead says, and Betty raises her eyebrows to him. “You gonna tell me more about want-will-won’t as a sex thing, or?”

The top of Betty’s chest flushes and her bright eyes sparkle and her laughing smile makes his heart swell.

.

“Hey,” Betty whispers, “do you remember this room?”

He turns onto his side to face her.

“Do I remember you jumping me in this room after prom, do you mean?” he asks wryly. Betty smiles, snakes her arm out from underneath the duvet to push gently at his chin.

“That was our first kiss!”

Jughead raises his eyebrows. “That was my first first-kiss.”

Betty gasps softly. “No it wasn’t. No—right?”

Jughead nods and her eyes go wide. “I’m not counting when Ethel attacked me at recess in third grade, I’d prefer not to.”

Betty purses her lips, but there’s also something that looks like delight in her eyes. “Oh my god,” she whispers, “I didn’t know that.”

“Mhm,” he nods. “It was a good one, don’t worry.”

Betty shifts slightly closer to him, reaches her mouth to meet his and kisses him softly. 

“What about you? Archie, right?” 

This he knows, surely. Until the end of high school, Jughead had been a distant observer to the strange web that was… _whatever_ tenuous detente Betty and Veronica maintained regarding Archie. Jughead—purposely—never lifted that rock, assuming whatever was underneath to surely be messy. His own subsumed feelings toward Betty only complicated things. 

But Betty shakes her head, rustling the pillowcase. “No,” she says, “not actually.”

Jughead wonders if he should even feel surprised, given he’s never asked Betty this most basic of getting-to-know-you dating questions. But then—he has always known Betty. When they began dating, they began to know each other again, differently. Even that had been so much unspoken, almost completely instinctual. 

“I’d always assumed Archie was your first kiss, so I never asked.” 

Betty shakes her head again. “Nope.”

Jughead pauses to wonder. “So who was it? Don't tell me it was Reggie.” He’s teasing, but there’s also the deepest, smallest seed of jealousy that he’d deny the very existence of. 

“Um,” she says. “Veronica, actually.” 

By the age of twelve, Veronica had apparently already kissed Chuck Clayton, finding the experience so anticlimactic as to be worried she’d done it wrong (or so Betty conveys to Jughead, in so many words).

Determined to avoid future kissing-related failures in her future, Veronica had presented a proposal to Betty: practice. Betty had considered the offer and decided it was sound, especially given that she did not want _her_ first kiss (with Archie, she had assumed) to turn out as miserably as Veronica’s with Chuck.

And so they’d kissed, in Veronica’s bedroom, over their social studies homework. 

After dinner, Betty declined Veronica’s invitation to sleepover—a near-weekly occurrence for them—claiming her mom wouldn’t allow her to do so that night, when in fact Betty had felt bashful and wanted to hide this feeling in the safety of her own bed at home. 

“And then I had a crush on her for a little while, but I didn’t _realize_ it was a crush, so instead we were just very, very, very close, and I was semi-confused, I only finally understood it when Veronica seemed to just, like,” she juts her palm out into the air above the blankets, “casually slide out of whatever closet she was in.” She pauses thoughtfully. “If she even _was_ in a closet.”

Jughead brushes his palm over the quilt, where it sits atop Betty’s hip. To not know something about Betty, when he has known Betty for so many years, in so many different ways—he considers the feeling ( _You are not your feelings_ ), and finds it makes him smile. 

“So who else did you have a crush on?” he asks her. 

“Besides you, you mean?” She teases, and despite feeling a warm glow from her words, he prods her on. “Well, for a hot second, Kevin, when he moved to town. Archie, obviously, my second kiss: eighth grade Harvest Dance,” she shrugs.

“You were Glinda the Good Witch.”

“Yes! You remember,” her smile is sly. “The girl who worked at the coffee counter at Cerberus, over in Greendale.”

“Wait—the blonde?” he interrupts. “Me too!” 

The existence of mutual crush strikes amusement in them, and Betty rolls closer into his side as they laugh. She smiles into his shoulder. 

They’re silent, and it is comfortable. Her palm is warm over his belly. 

“Did you love me then?” she asks softly, her jaw kneading gently into his shoulder with her words. Her tone is curious, and he pauses to consider his answer.

“Yeah,” he says, eyeing the ceiling. “I think I always loved you. I mean, I don’t think I was romantically in love with you when I was a kid or whatever…” She nods, waits patiently for him to continue. He searches for the words.

“So I—always loved you. You were my friend. You made me feel good, to be your friend. Does that make sense?” She nods, no longer smiling, forehead making that slight dip between her brows that Jughead knows to only occur when she’s attentive and thoughtful. 

He notices it a lot.

“I don’t know when that became a different kind of love. I guess there’s probably a lot of different kinds of love. I have an idea of the time range, at least.”

“Senior year?” Her voice is soft, but it’s not a whisper. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. That summer afterward.” He pauses. “Okay, hear me out, because I’m gonna reference that one freshman-year one-hundred level philosophy class I took here.” She makes a noble attempt at subduing the widening of her smile, but he’s just glad to have made her laugh, however silently. He drags his eyes from her face and searches the ceiling. 

“There’s this idea, I think it’s Derrida, that once you notice something’s there, you realize it was always already there.”

She makes an encouraging _mmm_ sound. 

“I love you the way I do now, because I loved you the way I did then. I don’t know if there’s one without the other. I mean—I can’t know. This is the only life I’ve ever lived, right?” He drags his eyes from the ceiling to look back down at her. “But they feel connected to me.” 

“Mm,” she says again, in understanding. 

.

Betty takes a photo of the coffee table-top to preserve a record of their work, her arm stretched out over the table’s surface, and then they begin to pull the post-its up, scrunching them into blue and green balls of paper, tossing them into the wood stove.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jughead notices Betty carefully peel up the post-it that reads “Be w/ Betty.” She folds it gently in half, slipping it into the back of her phone case, where Jughead knows she also keeps two fortune cookie slips.

( _The purpose of life, after all, is to live it. - Eleanor Roosevelt_ and _A good way to stay healthy is to eat more Chinese food_.)

Jughead pretends not to notice, but he feels himself smile, and tosses a post-it through the grate of the stove. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The epigraph is from _Moby-Dick_ , chapter 23, The Lee-Shore.
> 
> Always already is actually most notably a Heidegger idea, but in Jug’s defense it’s been several years since that Intro to Philosophy class.
> 
> Thank you for your patience with this chapter, and thank you also for reading this story.
> 
> PS yes, that is a real fortune cookie I once got.


End file.
